Hi: I plugged in my USB flash stick into my 9.1 box, copied a file to my hard drive, then pulled the device. Apparently, this time the system decided not to unmount it. Then I plugged it back in a little while later. Now it's all screwed up. mount says it's mounted, but nothing shows in the Konqueror for the mount point. Then a few minutes later the directories show up, but I get error messages when I try to look into anything. I cannot unmount the drive to reset things. It says "illegal seek". I did use the -f option, as root to attempt unmounting. Fortunately, though I thought I would have to reboot this thing, after shutting down X now root could unmount the device. I cannot get through even a few hours on any Linux desktop box without entering commands as root to clear up quirks. Bah! This removable media stuff (among other things) really needs to made *perfectly dependable* and non-quirky. The way it is now will have the Windows users running back to Bill G. ready to kiss his buttocks. The reality of using a Linux desktop to do complex general purpose computing in a professional capacity does not even match 10% of the hype. We need to become The Linux desktop is not yet ready without further serious polishing. Ease of install is not the issue anymore. It has to work well without quirks. The distributions need to team up and get some consistency in the way things work. It's really ridiculous to have two or more different configuration "control panels" for a system, neither of which can configure everything, which still requires hand editing config files. Then when you use another distro, it's totally different. Then when you update your distro after 6 months, you find that the way of handling things like removable media is totally different. What will they decide to do in another 6 months? Are they trying to impress themselves in the developers cubicles with clever new ways of doing things, or trying to make a consistent and dependable OS? In some applications I single click, in others I must double click to get the same effect. The font antialiasing uses subpixel hinting in KDE apps, not in non-KDE apps. So they look inconsistent. OpenOffice looks like unprofessional crap because the freetype lib in Suse 9.1 doesn't have the bytesode interpreter enabled (I think, which I will know for sure after recompiling it). Some of this isn't Suse's fault, I understand that. The point is more general, pertaining to the state of Linux desktop OS across all distros, and the way they all seem to be making their own way. Choice and freedom is great, and I want that. The world and the IT market desperately needs it. But there has to be consistency as well between distros and between versions of the same distro. SuSE insists on compiling open source apps like OpenOffice with their own wierd tweaks, and then wrapping the program in scripts to fix stuff that they think is broken. Unfortunately, in my years of experience with Suse, I have found this breaks more things than it fixes, and I almost always have to uninstall the Suse Mozilla and OpenOffice to install the vanilla ones, which miraculously work just fine. Why waste time and effort on recompiling them and writing several hundred line wrapper scripts then? What's worse, if you try to update the programs using the vanilla from the actual originating projects, the installers of course don't know anything about Suse's tweaks. So you wind up with even more inconsistencies. It would be Ok if Suse planned to provide prompt update packages for the programs like Mozilla and OOo whenever they are updated at their originating projects, but this doesn't happen. So they only way to get updated programs if you want to play the Suse way is to update the Suse distribution every time, which as I have mentioned brings with it a whole hoard of unexpected difficulties. Ok, rant over. Good day! -- ____________________________________ Christopher R. Carlen Principal Laser/Optical Technologist Sandia National Laboratories CA USA crcarle@sandia.gov