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I am working on my own ehmmm... sorry my company own live distribution based on Ubuntu. I would like to write something like control center with text, gui and web interface accessed by admin only:

  1. text interface - allows doing administrative tasks quickly even if normal session fails (bad video settings or something). Additionally there can be option to delete home-rw and live-rw settings and other low level tasks which couldn't be run in normal (gui) session. Started with grub entry option:

    init=/my_script.py

  2. normal gui - something like control center but customized/extended with my modules

  3. web - allows administrator to change the same computer settings via web browser (from another computer) + some stats, summary, info about this computer. In the previous version I've used Pyramid framework... And it would be nice if it could be accessible from mobile devices.

I thought about an pluginable system so it would be easy to add new functionality or change existing. On the 'bottom' there should be one(?) configurable script to do all the configuration tasks. For example to change net interface type:

./config networking change --intf=eth0 --type=auto

Do somebody have any idea how to do this with minimal efforts, without reinventing the wheel (using existing programs/scripts/libraries) ??? All ideas, opinions, advice and critics are welcome :)

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    Hi there. Ubuntu Landscape provides you with half the functionality you are already looking for. With UL you are able to send commands in the form of scripts as well as monitor & graph cpu load, memory usage, disk usage and so forth: landscape.canonical.com
    – kingmilo
    Feb 17, 2012 at 5:53
  • Hi. Yes I've tried this some time ago. It is very nice, but the problem is it is not free.
    – marcinpz
    Feb 19, 2012 at 10:47

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Writing your own control panel is no small task. Especially one that has three first class GUIs. Given that you've started this task by posting on AskUbuntu, my concern is that you are naively assuming this is going to be a quick project.

If you must continue, you might try starting with some code from YaST, OpenSuse's "Yet Another Setup Tool". It doesn't have a web GUI, but it does have console and graphical frontends, so presumably there is some separation in the code you could make use of. The trade-off, obviously, is that YaST is built for Suse, not Ubuntu.

But seriously, you're not using Canonical Landscape because it's too expensive? How much is your time worth? I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe your project as being in the years, not months, of work category.

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