Sorry for the huge delay in this Summery.
Thanks to everyone who responded. I have not had time to follow up any of
your replies yet but will get round to it eventually when the current
workload subsides.
My initial question was:-
>I have the job of setting up a front end menu system to allow inexperienced
>end uses to carry out basic Solaris and Ingres Database admin functions. The
>installations are all running headless servers with Solaris 2.3 and a dumb
>VDU (VT220 or similar) as the console. (ie. no OpenWindows)
>I can set up a menu system using shell scripts but this approach has
>limitations. Handing error conditions. providing help screens, drawing
>neat boxes round menu items. etc. is all very tedious. It's easy enough
>to make a basic system work but producing and maintaining a polished
>product is much too much like hard work.
>Solaris 2.3 comes with a package called FMLI (Forms and Menus Language
>Interface). It looks as though this may be exactly what I want but there
>seems to be **NO** worthwhile documentation on it!! Answerbook is no help.
>The man (1F) pages give some low level information but there is nothing that
>explains how to hang the commands together to make an overall application.
>Our local Sun Support are no help.
>So here are the questions.
>1) Is FMLI any use or should I forget about it?
>2) If it is any use, where can I find information on how to use it?
> Books, info. on the net, sample applications? Anything would be useful.
>3) Failing FMLI can anyone recommend any other menu packages which do a
> similar job?
Five responses were received:-
---------------------------------------------------
From: Rex McMaster <rmcm@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Vincent,
I haven't used FMLI, and cannot comment on its value, though I have recently
looked for character-based menuing software which was freely available
with source. I found the following;
1. menushell from Andrew Burt <aburt@du.edu>
2. pscmenu from Ted Wisniewski <ted@oz.plymouth.edu>
using Archie. Both appear to work well, though I haven't used them
extensively.
Cheers,
Rex
------------------------------------------------------
From: "David M. Di Gioia" <David.Digioia@gain.com>
> 3) Failing FMLI can anyone recommend any other menu packages which do a
> similar job?
Check Sysadmin magazine; any bookstore with a good selection of computer
magazines should have it. Several menu systems usually advertise in it.
------------------------------------------------------
From: Derek Andow <cso2!c10!derek>
Vincent,
> 1) Is FMLI any use or should I forget about it?
Seems to depend very much on what you are doing, and what you are
doing it on. We have three (main) types of platform
ICL/Sun/Sequent. On the ICL boxes it is ok, on Sequent a bit dodgy
on some of the more esoteric terminal types (a bug in curses) and a
little slow (but that is the application rather than the package)
and we haven't touched it on SUN. Indeed, we hadn't even noticed
it was there - :-)
> 2) If it is any use, where can I find information on how to use it?
> Books, info. on the net, sample applications? Anything would be useful.
There are a couple of books out there, but the one we used was the
standard AT&T SVR4 manual (sorry the actual book has gone walkies at
the moment) but it is the one with the "stars" on the front -
UNIX System V Release 4 Programmers Guide: Character User Interface
(FMLI)
> 3) Failing FMLI can anyone recommend any other menu packages which do a
> similar job?
There were a couple of PD tools out there that we looked at, but
given the variety of kit we were using at the time, nothing worked
generally. Forgotten the details .... sorry.
>
> Vincent Jary. DS Limited.
Derek
---------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Gottlieb <jimmy@denwa.info.com>
>1) Is FMLI any use or should I forget about it?
I use it for all our users here. It has its problems, but overall, I
like it a lot.
>2) If it is any use, where can I find information on how to use it?
There is a book in the Prentice-Hall series on SVR4 called:
Unix System V Release 4
Programmer's Guide: Character User Interface (FMLI and ETI)
ISBN: 013947045X
>3) Failing FMLI can anyone recommend any other menu packages which do a
> similar job?
I've looked at tons of them and still like FMLI the best.
-- Jim Gottlieb----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joe Turner <jdt@concorde.com>
I wrote a script/ipick-based menuing system for our dumb-as-bricks users. It requires that you have ipick installed on your system, and I actually had to add some functionality into ipick to make it DTRT.
If you want to check it out, I'd be happy to tar it up and you can ftp it from my site. It's documented enough for you to get the idea how it works.
Interested?
/joe
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Vincent Jary. DS LImited.
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