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Helix Setup Tools

Day-to-day system management on Unix systems is a chore. Even when you're using a friendly graphical desktop, seemingly basic tasks like setting the system time, changing the network setup, importing and exporting network shared filesystems and configuring swap partitions requires editing configuration files by hand, and the exact procedure varies between different operating systems and distributions.

The Helix Setup Tools solve all these problems, giving you a simple graphical interface for each task, which uses an advanced backend to edit all the relevant files and apply your changes. The interface looks and acts in exactly the same way regardless of what platform you're using.

Features:

Targeted towards end users: Helix Setup tools are the first system setup tools for end users who want to set up and maintain a Unix workstation.
Many platforms, single interface: Helix Setup Tools abstract away the differences between configuration of varying Unix platforms. The graphical user interface is always consistent, regardless of the underlying operating system.
Extendable architecture: The Helix Setup tools architecture is easily extendable, making it trivial for programmers and system administrators to add support for configuring their favorite services and platforms.

For more technical information about the architecture, see the Helix Setup Tools white paper.

Present and future:

Currently, three Helix Setup Tools are available. These are not yet considered stable enough to use in production, but are very suitable for testing and further development. The currently available tools are:

Name: Download: Configures:

Networking 0.1.0 Basic networking.

Name Resolution 0.1.0 Basic name resolution.

Shares 0.1.0 Importing and exporting SMB and NFS shares.

In the future, there will be many more tools, for configuring time, local harddisk mounts, swap partitions, users and groups, printing, and more. In addition, the following advanced functionality is planned:

CORBA interfaces to the configuration tools: Integrating the backends with CORBA will allow remote administration of systems.
Cluster configuration: Aimed towards system administrators, to allow configuring and reconfiguring large numbers of workstations remotely.
Presets: Through a panel applet, the user will be able to change system configuration to a number of presets, making it easy to have different configurations for different physical locations, so you can change your network options, default printer and so on depending on where you've set up your laptop at the moment.
Rollback: The Helix Setup Tools will be able to snapshot the state of the system periodically, so that if an error is made in the configuration, the user can drag a slider to "two days ago" and have the settings restored.
Integration with the GNOME control center: The Helix Setup Tools will be integrated into the new version of the GNOME Control Center.