Didn’t notice the comment approval thing in this CMS … so I just approved all the comments.
BTW i’ve been assured tomboy wasn’t political. I guess it was made using some other decision process I don’t understand.
Update
I unapproved the SPAM. I guess I might have to tone things down a bit - from the comments some people actually read this drivel, which is both good and bad to know. I’ll try to go back to coding and leave the pythonites and debianites alone.
I gave Fedora another go last night. No, not on the old laptop I used to develop Evolution on, but a desktop machine I rarely use (it has a dvd burner) - it has enough memory this time.
A few quirks. The installation was nice - a limited number of questions to begin with, then it went off and did the rest for me. This is how it should be - installing an operating system isn’t watching an interactive movie, why would I want to sit there watching a slide-show and answering more question as it goes along? I used the defaults but ‘installed everything’, without selecting individual packages. The default partitioning looked a bit weird - but whatever, if that’s what they reckon - at least it doesn’t have /spare (it’s an EDS thing). Although when it rebooted all I was presented with was a console control panel with no X. I configured that there, and quit - and it gave me a login prompt. Well no matter, log in as root, create a user account, then ‘init 5′ and we’re cooking with gas - oh it is nice to have the init system work ‘normally’ again.
Ahh a GNOME desktop. And no emacs. I thought I clicked on ’software development’!? Just some weird ‘developer help’ application (and given it seems to use its own help format and doesn’t handle info or man pages - rather useless help at that) and glade got installed with that option. Well I guess gcc must be there anyway.
Tomboy notes. Hmm, what a weird choice to install and turn on by default - to be honest I’ve never used any sticky note application - it has few of the benefits of real sticky notes, none of the benefits of a physical notebook, and limitations a text file doesn’t have. Anyway, definitely not worth having a whole vm running just for that. The only reason it ever got there was political - notes apps have been around forever but nobody thought they were worth including by default until mono came along. The only other mono thing is f-spot, which always seemed like a potentially cool application (yes I even have the t-shirt!) - but then again i’ve never used it - in the early days I could never get it to run reliably and it was very slow and extremely memory intensive, and now i’d probably just use my ps3 to look at pictures (or more likely just let the bits rot in the rain of neutrinos from deep space).
Another ‘update manager’. Oh now, I can see problems coming already. It warns me I need to install a gazillion updates. I ignore it for now (although the gigantic attention demanding billboard over half my screen is a little hard to ignore). Lets see how to install packages. Hmm, Add and Remove Software. Well, I guess it’s familiar to those windows users out there. And then things start to look not so good. Very very slow. I click on ‘XFCE’ and it goes off searching … and searching … and waiting. I check top - hmm, a few processes sucking lots of cpu. Has it just crashed? Oh, no - here we go, it’s finished. No packages. Hmm, that doesn’t seem right. I try a few more and have no luck - all empty. So I go back to the update manager … start it up.
Oooh. Slow. Has it crashed again? It’s sucking cpu like there’s no tomorrow, and nothing appears to be happening - I give it the benefit of the doubt and go back to the TV. Hmm, after 15 minutes - no apparent progress. Ahh, by left-clicking rather then right-clicking on the updater icon I get a status window - such as it is. It just looks stuck - for some time, then it slowly lurches forward, and for the next 45 minutes or so inches it’s way to the end of the line. Oh well, maybe it was busy on the net (not sure why the cpu was so busy though), and who needs to run updates all the time anyway.
Back to ‘add and remove programs’ - by this time I’d searched and discovered this was a new thing called ‘PackageKit’. Ahaah. Anyway, wow. Slow. I mean, not just a bit slow - this is remarkably unusably slow in a really embarrassing way. When the list of packages finally arrive (I was still looking for xfce here), I get the option to click on it and wait for it to load the 1 line of package info as well. Or I can click on the tabs for the other bits of info, and wait even longer - although the more I click on the longer I wait since each is queued up and invoked sequentially. So there appears no ‘meta-package’ (in debian speak) to install xfce, well lets try and install the session and panel - maybe that’ll let me change desktops. Oh dear. Dear oh dear. Now it goes off installing one package at a time (with no real progress indication) and queues up every other job in the meantime. Then it reloads the whole list again in record breaking bullet-time, and lets me go through that unpleasant experience all over again. Hang on, doesn’t Fedora have yum? It isn’t perfect, and was never particularly fast, but it did a lot more a lot faster than this piece of junk.
yum rediscovered - quite a bit tastier than PK. I ran a gnome-terminal so I could run an xterm (oh the irony), and got to work.
yum remove mono
Gone! I get enough .NET at work. And other reasons I needn’t bore you with. Hmm, it seemed to spend an awful long time running gconf-tool during the de-install. I hope gconf isn’t becoming a dreaded global registry … something for another time perhaps.
yum remove PackageKit
Oh oh, it’s gone. I’m finally starting to enjoy Linux again. And the shitty update button is gone too - which seemed to go off and check for updates every minute or so for a good second or more of CPU TIME! I can’t see why updates need to be checked more than daily really - and certainly not such a heavy process.
I still wasn’t sure how to change my desktop - things in /etc/defaults seem to go changing all the time, and i’m sure there was a tool for it. Ahh switcher. yum install switcher. Hmm, not too much documentation. Actually, none. It doesn’t even tell you what options are available. switcher xfce … you need to yum groupinstall xfce. Ok easy enough. Took less than 5 minutes - I imagine it would have taken over an hour in PackageKit, with no guide as to which packages to install either. Done. Switched, done. Logout.
Ahaah! Now the desktop login option is back at least. Although it’s still set to GNOME. Ok, log in to XFCE now. What is that damn network monitor crapplet doing running on this fixed-network workstation? And how come there is no option to quit it like every other crapplet I don’t want?
yum remove whatever-it-was Gone. And at least it’s just gone by itself too - Ubuntu seems to want to de-install init every time you try to remove almost anything.
I did a ps | grep for python. Ahh more useless shit to fuck-off (it was getting late - I had had just about enough of it by now). Whatever they were - gone and gone. The printer thing will have to wait, since from memory it’s part of CUPS - but I’ll check when I have time again and care to.
Hang on, what else is wrong - why does the damn file manager have to open up the window when I put a cdrom in the drive? And steal your focus? How annoying is that - typing away USING the computer - you know - MULTITASKING and the computer absolutely damands your time to look at some CD you put in the drive. After a little hunting I found the options. Off, don’t play damn cd’s or movies automatically either. At least it’s a world of improvement over Winblows which wants you to confirm that you want to open it AS WELL (and get this - how to open it!), after searching for some auto-play application and copying the TAGA LIPA ARE! Virus to your internet explorer again.
Ok, it seems to be working ok now - although I wonder if I can get the ‘legacy’ nivdia drivers working for my ‘ancient’ card (OpenGL - Blender). Maybe I should look at putting this on my laptop too.
BUT Get rid of PackageKit - it’s an utter embarrassment - extremely limited features, terrible usability and SLOW and bloated (gee, red-carpet blew this shit away - 5 years ago, even with all of its earlier bugs and issues). An ‘update icon’ should be tiny and unobtrusive, use very little cpu and poll the server MUCH less often using a lighter protocol - and it’s just a desktop applet - worthless for a multi-user or headless machine anyway. Why install the network manager applet on a fixed workstation? How about a mobile profile? Why can’t it be removed in xfce? Fewer python crapplets overall would be a good idea. And mono ones - oh dear. Hint (for both python and mono): There’s a reason java applets never took off on the web.
Sigh. It’s just about the last straw for me and debian-based systems.
I wanted to read about the texinfo format, so naturally I ran ‘info texinfo’, and all I got was a man page which told me to run ‘info texinfo’ to get the full documentation. Oh funny - GNU is full of recursive jokes but this is just silly. Ahh well off to try and install it. Hmm, no texinfo-doc package, huh? Just some non-free ‘info files’ which didn’t seem related to texinfo at all. Oh what? They ARE the documentation. WTF Is going on?
Ho hum. Ok, so i’m a bit late to the party - 2 and a bit years late - but really, these debian guys have lost the plot a bit - they’ve always had a ‘*BSD crowd’ feel about them and things like this just reinforce that impression. Maybe that’s why i’ve had so much trouble finding the documentation for just about everything I looked for.
Complete documentation is a core strength of Unix and by extension the GNU system. It is one of it’s main benefits over other so-called ‘operating systems’ like Windows. Without readily accessible man pages how can you learn to use the system? To write software? I learnt perl from the rather excellent man pages that at least used to exist - why buy a book which will be out of date quickly and is hard to search?
Documentation IS part of an application. To not install it by default is bad enough, to not install it on purpose for quite petty reasons is utterly atrocious.
My house mate wanted to edit her CV, but of course it is in microsoft’s shitty binary format. Loading it into open office has about as many formatting issues as it did the last time I tried something similar years ago … maybe open office devs aren’t focusing on those kind of things (i thought it was a focus at least at some point). I’m not blaming them - its ms, or more directly, TAFE for wasting limited educational resources on such rubbish.
Google docs was actually a little better - it lost more formatting, but it did it in a more consistent and visually pleasing manner. Still, not much use for this case either. The file hasn’t really been formatted properly (not using styles/margins properly) - but what can you - that is the mode of operation wysisyg editors enforce.
Microsoft re-announcing that they’re going to support ODF has no positive meaning either. Even if they ever do what they say, they will still have enough incompatibilities that they will just set the ’standard’ on any ambiguous language in the specification, or simply break it on purpose. You can quite legitimately claim to support a standard, yet still have ‘bugs’ which make your product the one the others have to follow or work with. Just look at internet explorer, or outlook
At work we had a shitty office 2003 xml loader for excel files, but I got sick of its api and wrote a csv loader instead. Oh joy, so nice to be able to edit excel ‘files’ in emacs, and now they load almost instantly, using fewer lines of code, and much less memory. Rather than having to run-time compile an xml de-serialiser and load the whole thing into memory into objects that get translated into arrays of strings, which mostly get thrown away. So it has fewer features, but they’re not features I actually need.
While i’m here - I’m a bit sick of the ‘xml solves the worlds woes’ rubbish - if anything the whole ooxml debacle should prove otherwise. XML is not really a panacea for anything, it’s just a convenient if a bit complicated file format for data interchange. There are far simpler and far more efficient binary formats for the same thing too, which would probably make an awful lot more sense when you don’t need a text editor to edit them (xmlrpc, soap, anyone?). I find it rather disturbing that people talk about using ‘the dom’ as an internal api for an applications which work with XML as a ‘good thing’ too. It isn’t. It is a terrible api for internal data manipulation. XML should stick to what it is good at (hmm, is it even?), data interchange. An external format. Letting external file formats directly become your internal data representation is just as bad as doing it the other way around. It might be convenient for one-off simple applications, but all you’re doing is replacing native language features with amorphous language neutral ones which will never be as easy to write or maintain or scale.
Had a strange episode on my laptop last night. Not sure if it’s the update I ran a few hours before, or flakey hardware, but all of a sudden I couldn’t start any new shells, and the cpu was locked so hard the machine turned into a hair dryer (which is why I wanted to run a shell - to run top). I used the xfce process manager to kill a busted bash process which was locking the cpu (although unlike windows, the machine was still responsive enough, I didn’t want to burn the thing out).
Turns out that /bin/bash somehow got corrupted. Hmm, tricky. Bit hard to fix something like that if you can’t log in - so much for gui tools. Hmm, what to do. I thought of emacs and shell mode, and guessed the way to specify the shell to run. After trying all the obvious things like ash, tcsh, and csh and discovering none of those shells were installed, I took a punt on the oddly named but completely unfamiliar dash. Horrah, finally I could run a shell!
dash and started poking around. Hmm, apt-get --reinstall install bash perhaps? Oh no, it needs bash to run the pre/post install scripts - it just always failed. Poked around man pages in dpkg and apt-get. Not much luck, no obvious way to disable the scripts. But at least I found where the package was cached. Hmm, dpkg-reconfigure? Oh helpful. Package bash is not working or only partially installed. No shit sherlock. Bear with me here, I really don’t grok debian’s package system - all I remember from the Evolution days is that they made up their own packages and versions which just gave the developers extra headaches. Ahaah, dpkg-deb -x bash* /tmp/foo. We have a binary. cp bin/bash /bin/bash, re-fix my shell, and finally it works.
Bit of a panic there - it’s been so long since i’ve had to administer a box at that level (apart from disabling all the crap that runs at login), and quite frankly there’s a reason for that. Hmm, so maybe there’s some hardware issue with my machine - firefox has started crashing a lot too (firefox 2 that is, 3 was way too much to use), or maybe it’s just related to the 8.04 install or an update.
I’ve literally spent all day trying to install Fedora Core 8 on my old laptop - the one I used to (fairly easily) develop Evolution on. Hmm, default - too slow and bloated to be remotely usable (took about 2 hours to boot the live-cd and get the installer running from the console). Got xfce installed (after some mucking about) - barely better. Got rid of the bloat of gdm - xdm - now the desktop is back to gnome. Sigh. Hacked it to get xfce to run after a lot of buggerising around (there seems to be no easily obvious way to get it to work - and while I was there I saw the twm login wont ever work). What’s all this python shit sucking 50mb of precious ram doing stuff I don’t give a shit about? Sigh. chmod -x /usr/bin/python* … horrah, finally I can log in in under 2 minutes. Cut my login overhead in half - the other half is still too much - xfce is rather bloated. Pity the python chmod broke yum.
Yum isn’t so yummy after-all. Re-enabled python so i could run yum. Wow 120mb of vm to install a couple of packages. Not bad considering the box only has 128mb. This is crap.
Hmm, should I try xubuntu - or will it be just as crappy and bloated and blighted by python poo?
Guys - python isn’t a fucking system language. Just like perl, it isn’t suitable for long-lived applications (or crapplets) either. Use it to write your shitty little throw-away perl scripts in a different syntax, but don’t fuck up linux desktops with this rubbish.
What the hell is wrong with some of the people in this country? Some of the other papers have comments as well, but many of them are so sickening I couldn’t link to them.
While i’m here, why did ubuntu 8.04 install a damn beta of firefox? At least it’s easy to downgrade.
I thought i’d try something a bit different and recreate some Amiga demo routines I wrote 15 years ago (hmm, was it that long).
Hmm, still some way to go … The next bit of this routine is going to be tricky without the blitter and a bitplane oriented display …
I noticed emacs was a bit funny on my ps3 - just didn’t look right and behaved funny. The scrollbar didn’t work properly, and now you can scroll too far down. And whats with this rubbish that selecting text with the mouse suddenly vanishes when you hit delete? That isn’t emacs behaviour.
Oh. Gtk+. I see. Sigh. I guess it’s menu-bar can’t cope with emacs’ model, or whomever coded it decided it needn’t changing.
Or maybe it’s just ubuntu. The delete thing seems to be an option that’s off by default according to the manual - although the setting seems to have no effect on the delete key on ubuntu’s version.
While searching around for a fix I found some idiot had come up with the idea of modernising emacs … If I wanted to use a modern editor i’d just use one - there’s dozens of the bloody things out there. But if you want emacs, you bloody well want emacs.
I upgraded my laptop to 2008-April, and I had to fix a few other issues with firefox too - I can’t get the fonts to work the way I’d got them to work before, which is a pity. And the stupidly ugly animated sliding tab thing really pissed me off till I found the undocumented option to turn it off. Why anyone thinks that animating any part of the ui toolkit is ‘cool’ is beyond me. When I click on a button I want to see the results as instantly as possible, not after waiting to the end of some stupid and pointless animation that just gets in the way. It might look ‘cute’ once, but even that’s a maybe. Thankfully it still has emacs with no gtk in it - although I wonder how long that will last - the comment on the emacs package I really wanted said I probably didn’t want it, and suggested I chose the gtk one instead.
Sometimes it’s the little things.
I needed to scan a page into the computer to send in an email, and I thought ‘no worries, there’s a scanner at work doing nothing i’ll give that a go’. Oops, we only have Windows XP x86_64 and the drivers wont work. Fortunately I have a couple of linux distros installed on one of the machines which I never use, so I thought i’d give one a go. Didn’t work first time, wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, e.g. I had to run xsane as root, and I had to get some firmware from the windows installer (no problem actually, I just used wine to ‘install’ the 32 bit package). But once I did all that - worked fine. Installed the firmware, fired it up, got a scan. Email sent. Job done.
XP 64 bit? Up shit creek without a paddle.
![[FSF Associate Member 6418]](http://blogs.gnome.org/zucchi/files/2008/03/fsf-member.png)
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