begin Ben Rosenberg's quote: | Well, Richard posted a fix link earlier that ended up actually | working for me. It seems that Ximian (the dumbass's that they are) | put a lot of config files for oaf in /usr/share and a lot of | binaries in /usr/bin even though they KNOW SuSE uses /opt. Well, as | soon as I spent about an hour rooting through /usr/share and | deleting anything remotely related to a Gnome program and I ran | their little oafd-config tool. It all started working again. At | least I can copy my stuff out of Evolution into JPilot. I've used | Mutt for a couple years so there is no way I would trust Evolution | with my email. I trusted it with my PIM data and almost got burned. you have made my point for me. they put stuff in /usr because that's where red hat puts it. now, i can point to a dozen places where for two years i've been screaming and jumping up and down about how this is not only fundamentally wrong for practical reasons -- /opt offers a back-out path if something goes wrong in a desktop upgrade -- but also in violation of the fhs and effectively a forking of linux, which constitutes nothing more or less than leveraging their dominant market position. they do it, and as a result, you have problems making it work with suse. suse packages will break things on red hat. this kind of pissing match among the distributions is *not* good for linux in general. anders says it's good for consultants; if the health of consultancy were the reason we came to linux, that would be a good thing, but for me and, i suspect, many others, that was not the reason we did so. i came to suse because it handles /opt appropriately, but i discovered that it opens up a whole new area of flakiness, which discovery i made when i opened /etc/inittab in a text editor, as has been a perfectly acceptable thing since there has been an /etc/inittab, and changed the default runlevel to 3 -- only to have suse's configuration tool change it back to 5 at the first opportunity. this is in its own subtle way a symptom of the same disease, because it replaces the value of linux competency with a need to know suse as opposed to linux. this benefits no one except consultants who succeed in getting their clients to adopt the distribution or distributions for which the consultant has the secret decoder ring. what's so bad about it is that there is no reason for it, except to screw other linux distributors. which is why, imho, solid lsb and fhs are so important, as is simply refusing to use any distribution that doesn't follow it and that does goofy stuff such as changing user edits in configuration files. my point is that there is no good reason why ximian gnome or any other gnome shouldn't have installed perfectly on your system. but it didn't, and that fact can be laid at the feet of distributions having decided to wander off in their own directions, again for no good reason. if there were a reason for it, that would be one thing. but there isn't. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.