On Sunday 07 July 2002 07:37 am, you wrote:

I spend quite a bit of time in mozilla under kde. While the Konq hardly ever aborts on me, Mozilla is a lot less stable. This is my second attempt at writing this mail because the first one got lost when Mozilla died when my DSL connection timed out. The original 8.0 versions of kde3 and Mozilla were just plain instable, the newest versions are a bit better. When I start Mozilla, moving the mouse before it has completely loaded often causes it to fail to load. This failure in turn often then causes kdeinit to terminate (error message: something to do with DCOP) which means I have to exit kde, kill the startx session with .ctrl.C and try again. I wonder if other people recognise those symptoms.

Yes, I used to be a 100% Netscape person, but gave it up when I went to Linux. Netscape/Mozilla's just always been busted on *nix. I use Konq for everything.

A while ago, I cleaned up my /tmp directory. This left me totally unable to start X11 (kde) at all. Not even knowing what the problem was, I finally ended up re-installing virtually the entire system except for /home. That will teach me to take backups - mea culpa.

Problem is many directories & files must never be removed. Their dependent apps cannot write a directory if missing. I do not know which is which. And sometimes ppl move their tmp to say, /var/tmp . (I do... different partition) Trouble is, when you do this, all files and dirs within have permissions changed to your current user. This is very bad. Best to tar/untar to relocate.

This brings me to the 8.0 release itself. I am used to 'tailoring' releases (especially on the servers I control) to batten them down against crackers. This is something that I do not feel able to do with 8.0. Cause and effect are sufficiently opaque to me (wiping /tmp and thus killing kde is the worst example) that there is no way I could upgrade any of 'my' servers to this level. They will remain on 7.3 for the time being, the most likely upgrade path at the moment being Slackware. KDE is not even an issue there, they do not have X at all. I have DSL here. Without DSL to download the updates, this version of SuSE would have been a total mess. My first SuSE level (5.1 or something) was essentially *stable*, as were most of the others I have used since.

Going very off-list (kde) here, yast2 cannot handle initial upgrade installation when read-only partitions are present, even if these are mounted as something like /cd_doc_copy. None of yast2's business! Upgrading my laptop was a total mess, with frequent stops where I had to reboot and restart. The error-message (if one came at all) was 'spurious 8259a interrupt: IRQ7'. This turned out to mean that SuSE 8.0 did not like my Logitech wheel-mouse, something that 7.3, 7.2, 7.0 and so on down had been quite happy with (ok, I used yast1 for all of them).

Afraid I agree with you here, although I had a different constellation of symptoms. I fought mightily for three weeks to make it work, always DLing the latest updates. It was unusable. I was not getting any real work done, so I was forced to backgrade to 7.3 . All the distros have become so abstracted from intuition and interdependent that it's just not possible to configure most things 'under the skirts'. Alot of this is necessary for the graphical config tools, so I guess we're in a transition phase. The one complaint I have of all unices is excessive complexity of the filesystem. There is alot of junk visible (and necessary to search through) that is simply irrelevent for 98% of everything I really do. Also there hasn't been agreement on where to put things, but that is getting resolved. I use Linux to get my REAL work done. I cannot be tinkering and bit-twiddling even 20% of the time. I think Suse recognises this and is working on it. What really happened with 8 is that Suse could not get it ready when it needed to be released. Maybe they lost/laid off some key talent or it was just not enough people for the job, but I'm sure they did the best they could. Trouble is, this shifts the costs of using Suse to the customer. This had better not happen again. We're all on the edge. We must remember though that K is completely out of their control.

Hopefully 8.1 will be an improvement.

It must be. -- "I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering." -- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado", Gilbert & Sullivan