I'll add my two cents as if this was a survey :-)

I did immensely feel that a GUI was missing when I started with AMANDA. Now I 
absolutely don't see a need for it for regular day to day use. Makes perfect 
sense to me that if you're the one setting amanda up you shouldn't be afraid 
of the prompt, and on something as important as backups for an organization, 
you should know how it works and and THAT it does. A GUI to set up AMANDA 
would just help you take your job more lightly.

I do however see a place for a GUI: In my case I'm setting up AMANDA at a 
customer's site, I will not be the one in charge of day to day operation and 
while the email setup amanda has is perfect for rotating tapes and knowing 
which tape goes in next, I have a problem picturing linux illiterates having 
to log into a server prompt ant typing stuff to flush the holding disk if a 
rotation was missed or lableling/deleting a tape alsto, to periodically test 
the backups maybe even by doing a dummy restore of some files to a temporary 
directory. For little things like that, part of the general maintenence I'd 
want the customer to take care of without my intervention I'd like to see a 
GUI. I'm creating comand aliases instead and that's ok :-)

As far as the "form" of the GUI, the way I'd picture it is simply webbased, no 
need for X libraries, very minimal stuff is really needed on the server, it 
can be accessed locally or from ANY computer on the network with any platform 
as long as there is a browser. If I could write one I'd probably make it a 
Webmin module.

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 01:40, Anthony A. D. Talltree wrote:
> Brandon makes some good points.  I'll add a couple points of my own that
> some may take for granted:
>
> o For a user interface to be friendly, it has to in fact be runnable.
> Window system interfaces tend not to work well on text consoles or in
> environments where the user is running on a different machine which for
> various reason't can't display a remote X session from the server.  Some
> sites have draconian policies against X libraries even being installed
> on servers
>
> o An increasing number of graphical interfaces these days are being done
> with gtk/GNOME, which effectively limits them to running on Linuxes.
>
> Of course, the existence of a graphical interface doesn't really
> preclude the continued existence of the CLI, but one might worry about
> the latter being deprecated.

-- 

Riccardo Parola
Internet Manager
Standard Printing & Web
http://www.standardprinting.net