gecco was designed with ease of extensibility in mind. To that end, gecco's functionality is completely dependant on plugins. This allows anyone to add to gecco's usefulness, simply be writing a plugin.

There are a number of benefits of using plugins instead of having a single application. First of all, users do not have to use functionality that they don't want; they simply need not install the plugin. For developers, it allows functionality to be added without having to work on a large code base, with several version branches and authors. Also, developers will find that building plugins is quite easy, relative to adding to an existing application.

The geccoDummy plugin is a fully functional plugin for gecco. It does nothing more than display a text label in a window, but all of the necessary code to start is already there. What's more, geccoDummy comes with a shell script that helps to create a new plugin source tree, based on geccoDummy. The script will ask a few questions, and based on the responses, will proceed to set up the new source tree. The plugin will work immediately with gecco.

gecco can always use new plugins, and people are encouraged to contribute. All help possible will be given to gecco plugin developers. Below is a list of ideas to start; comments and suggestions are always welcome:

• cron
• dhcpcd
• fstab
• inetd/tcp wrappers
• inittab
• ipchains (packet filtering, masquerading, port forwarding, and accounting)
• libraries (eg. ld.so.conf)
• lilo
• pppd
• printers
• run levels
• shell profiles
• syslog
• system greetings (eg. issue, issue.net, motd)
• various services (eg. bind, Sendmail, Apache, FTP daemons, dhcpd, etc.)