On 2/1/19 8:19 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
Well, as it happens, I ran into this recently. I got a new microSD card that was formatted exfat, and I got whatever the standard message was.
My solution - STFW for what was needed to run exfat. Search the repos for anything exfat related, and install them. Then try again and look at the logs.
And guess what - I got it working. Took all of about 15 minutes.
That's what I did when I first encountered ExFAT on an Ubuntu box, too, yes. But ExFAT isn't blacklisted, is it? That's different. IIUIC then even if the driver is there, it won't be loaded.
I think people should be able to figure it out, yes. Why do we assume that people are stupid or unable to ask questions when they run into problems?
Because, for the most part, people _are_ stupid. Even if they're very smart and educated in one area, that area probably isn't Linux, and if it is Linux, it probably isn't *SUSE.
Isn't that what the community is for?
No, I don't think it is. I mean, as an example, I got a new PC recently at work. It has nVidia graphics. Getting the nVidia driver working on Tumbleweed was pretty horrible. After a lot of experimentation, I ended up downloading the file direct from nVidia US and installing it, because unlike anything in the repos, AFAICT, this does stuff like blacklisting the "nouveau" driver for you. Then I discovered that every time TW gets a new kernel, X.11 falls over. I installed DKMS but it's not working. So I wanted to try the built-in drivers. Problem #1: there are 2. One ending in G05 and one ending in G04. I can't find anything official or canonical with Google as to which package installs which GPUs. At least nVidia's website tells you that for its drivers -- but not for *SUSE's. This took many retries, reboots etc,. as you might imagine. It's G04. It's a new machine from early this winter, with a new graphics card, but it's the "older" (?) driver. I found some changelogs from a couple of years ago that mentioned this. That was all and it took a lot of digging. No wonder I couldn't get the G05 drivers working. And of *course* they don't fail with any helpful error like "this driver does not support this GPU". No, it's a random message about no screens found or something. Problem #2: there are an interrelated complex of drivers to install. It's not one package and they don't seem to depend on each other. I needed to manually install 4 separate packages: nvidia-computeG04 nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default nvidia-glG04 x11-video-nvidiaG04 The relevance of this? Drivers are _hard_, stuff like blacklisting stuff is harder, and troubleshooting it is not easy. On a more mainstream desktop distro, I'd run the proprietary-drivers tool, it would detect what I need, offer me a choice of versions and just do it for me. But *SUSE is not like that. I think that: [1] We should try to make it more like that. [2] We should not blacklist code that people active in the community are using.
It's not common sense that if you have a problem that you should look at the log files?
No! You know why? Because that's not how it works on Windows and that's all most PC users know. Second reason: because we have blasted systemd now and as a result of that, half the most common basic logfiles have bally well disappeared and are now in some binary log format I don't know, hidden I don't know where and only viewable by a tool I don't know. So when I started troubleshooting TW, a very early step was to install some package that disables systemd's binary logging and gives me actual logfiles again. *Then* I had to wait for various problems to occur again so that now I could actually look into plain text logfiles with ``less'' and find out what was going on. This took extensive googling. I do not claim to be a *nix genius, but I do submit that this kind of thing is _not_ "common sense".
Then we need to educate users how to perform really basic troubleshooting.
"This bridge... how many lanes do you want?" http://www.jokeindex.com/joke.asp?Joke=3529
Because if they're having problems with this, IMNSHO, then they're having problems with things like how to log in and enter their passwords correctly.
You think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_passwords Did you know, the old ICQ chat system still works? It's about the last man standing. AIM is gone, which even Apple iMessage once used. Yahoo has gone. MSN IM has gone. Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP. But ICQ got sold off and it still works. But people aren't going back to it. I've asked my friends why not. Some are on my "buddy list" and it's one of the few person-to-person chat systems that still works in proper client apps such as Pidgin. Why not? Because they don't know their old passwords, they don't have access to the old email addresses they registered under, and so they can't get their accounts back. These people are often technies, professional sysadmin types. Every online service in the world is _littered_ with multiple dead accounts for people who changed email and forgot. I still have the same email address as I did in 1991 and I have a system for generating unique passwords in my head, so I can work out what password I used, even 25 years later. But I am very unusual. So, *yes* not knowing how to log in as another user, how to remember 2 different passwords, stuff like that is hard! Yes, it really is, and most ordinary users can't do it. And as I have also said, if we want to get people to come and use our server distros, then we _need_ the mindshare that comes from having a good, easy, solid, polished desktop distro to tempt them in.
Using dmesg and other logging systems should be second nature.
[1] Maybe it should, but it isn't. [2] It isn't going to be, either. [3] If of course it actually still works. Systemd or the like might have replaced such legacy tools, same as ``ifconfig'' doesn't work any more, or /etc/resolv.conf doesn't.
It's like looking at the event viewer in Windows when a service doesn't start.
True story. 4y ago I interviewed with IBM for a midrange tech support job, 2nd/3rd level. The first interview question was: on a Windows machine, where would you look for error logs? This is a question they use to weed out _advanced_ techies from normal techies. Yes, really. Not a friend, *me*. Other examples: you want to test a connection to another machine by IP address. What commands might you use? Again: 2nd/3rd line support. I was some 46 years old at the time. This is _not_ basic stuff any more.
Yeah, my mother wouldn't know to do that - but she would know to ask someone who knows more, and that's what the community is for.
We should spare the need to ask anyone anything as much as possible.
But we're talking here about a change that affects more technical users - my mom isn't going to run a combined OS/2 and Linux box and need hpfs support. People who run that kind of combination are not causal users, they're people with a specific need and a specific skill set. We shouldn't treat them like idiots.
Doesn't matter. Another example: While at Red Hat, I complained that the Fedora installer failed with a multiboot setup of Windows and another Linux distro. Response: Will Not Fix. Reason: We are a server distro. Servers do not dual-boot. We do not support dual-booting except with a single copy of Windows installed with default settings. You attempted to install on an unsupported configuration. Big companies often feel they don't need to support little edge cases. But little edge cases that are obscure to 1 person/group/community are core to others. But to others, these may be prime, high-priority needs. You shouldn't dismiss anything as unimportant as it's an edge case. One person's edge case is another's basic spec.
And those users, as I stated above, have some technical chops because they have a specific need for that combination. I mean really, we're not just talking OS/2 fans. We're talking OS/2 fans *who dual boot* and need to support hpfs in order to access data shared with a local OS/2 installation.
That's a pretty small audience no matter how you slice it.
That's not the point. Stuff like this highlights problems that may be niche when the offending driver is $FOO but then 6 months later you find it also affects driver $BAR and some company is shipping a million devices a day that need driver $BAR. You have 6 users who need driver $FOO but 60 million users who need driver $BAR. If you'd fixed the problem for $FOO then you'd have had 60 million happy campers, but you didn't, because you thought it only affected 6 people and as a direct result you have a major PR disaster on your hands. Example: the Pentium FDIV bug. The specific numbers were super-rare and many people would never have been affected, but an oversight nearly bankrupted Intel. Heartbleed. This stuff really happens. Don't leave edge cases because they're obscure or niche because it's a law of nature they'll come back and bite you. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org