On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 21:52:14 -0400 "Donavan Pantke" <avatar@dcr.net> wrote:
On Tuesday 29 October 2002 20:11, Chris Carlen wrote: -- snip
Well, I have spent an afternoon wasting time describing the problems, and finding more problems at such a high rate [...]
<soapbox> I'm sure that the KDE and SuSE folks would love to hear these misc. bug reports and such. Perhaps the vast majority of us linux users out there spend so much troubleshooting time in man pages or google, that many haven't properly tested/commented on the SuSE helpcenter. And that, of course, would hinder SuSE in it's attempts to improve it. The KDE problems obviously need to be looked that, and perhaps with a bug report to SuSE and so forth a patched KDEbase will come out that addresses these issues. I agree with the OpenOffice rant, it's a pretty good app, but I've run into a good deal of issues with how it operates. Perhaps around 1.5 or 2.1 it'll be polished up good enough to be a serious competetor to M$ Office. My advice would be to snip up your post and the different parts to SuSE, KDE, and OpenOffice, and see what comes of it. Most likely updated RPMS in a couple of weeks, I'd hope. Rants are fine, but SuSE 8.2 won't be any better if the rants aren't given to the people that need them.
From that point, I admit to a certain glee when I can go for three or four days of actual system usage (i.e., desktop stuff with word processor, drawing, and other office tools) without anything ugly or show-stopping happening. However, that glee is not from accomplishment, since I know that any success (or failure to fail) is not an accomplishment. Instead, it is merely a dodging of the bullet or a case of being temporarily overlooked by the demons and malevolent spirits
<counter-rant> I'm probably not speaking for ALL the people who don't write bug reports, but I'm speaking for me, and I suspect for quite a *bunch* of people. I don't write bug reports. I'm hoping my 8.1 will arrive soon, but I still have dozens of things that are broken from 8.0, and that's been almost a year, hasn't it? So why am I such a selfish bastard, and where are all the bug reports? My complete and well-considered answer is "How the f*** would I know?" I've been groping in the dark, off and on, with Linux (almost all with SuSE) for a few years. I'm about 10,000% ahead of where I was when I started, and that only means that I've got "slightly-better- than-newbie" understanding. So what?.... I'm lazy or stupid. Well, the so-what is that when something goes wrong, I have absolutely zero confidence in ANY guess I could make about which of 1600 things might be wrong, but I have about 98% confidence that it must be operator error, on my part. I'm never going to write a bug report, because every system that accepts bug reports has a FAQ that says: 1) make sure that this is a real bug 2) make sure that this is a bug with just/only our piece of the software jungle, and not one of the other 1600 things that might be broken - in the operating system kernel, - in modules you might have loaded, or modules you might not have known you should have loaded, or modules you thought were loaded, but have since been unloaded by some other software that you installed, or - repeat the above paragraph, but substitute the word "library" for every occurrence of "module" or - repeat the above paragraph, but substitute the word "dependency" for every occurrence of "module" or "library", or - repeat the above paragraph, but substitute the word "config file" for every occurrence of "module" or ... 3) make sure it's not operator error or setup/config error, all of which is explained somewhere else... well, actually in 1600 "somewhere elses", most of which must be approached/edited/configured in a certain order, which is "we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you". So, I've never reached the point where I think anything is a bug, until after a bunch of people have claimed the same "bug" on the mailing list, and NOT been shouted down as doofuses who should have RTFM'd a little better. (Never mind that I don't seem to HAVE the FM or the help working for most apps...) So, when those people have already said my problem (if I've actually got the same problem and am not just indulging in wishful thinking) is a bug, well the bug has been reported, and they don't need my tentative duplicate report to clutter the system. Hell, if I get an error message that says: "Segmentation fault, the program is badly broken, please send the log file to this URL....", I still figure it's probably because I didn't configure something correctly, and not an actual bug. My experience with Linux is that I load the new distribution (usually clean, because I've learned to not trust upgrades...). Then, I set about making the current X-dressing (KDE or GNOME or some less integrated flavor-of-the-month) look and work approximately the way I want, so that it won't annoy me too much when I begin trying to: a) fix things that are broken/misconfigured from the initial installation b) get some actual work done. that ARE going to get me as soon as I blink. Mostly, I don't do any gaming, partly from a relative lack of interest, and partly because I've never gotten 3D acceleration to work without breaking something that I need for work. Sometimes I can get my Microsoft joystick to work, but usually not at the same time that 3D video acceleration is working... I'm not an MP3 user, but I occasionally listen to audio CDs... when that's working, but I consider it largely a matter of dumb luck if I plug a CD in, and sound comes out my speakers. Next week, it won't happen that way, even though I *think* that I haven't touched (well, not deliberately) any configuration files this week. Every time I install a new distro, either CD audio or system sounds is broken for a month or three. The system sounds thing doesn't bother me much, because the thrill of having my opening and closing windows make stupid star-treck or jungle sounds, kinda wore off in the first five minutes. There was a time that I actually was able to play a DVD with tolerable sound, and with a picture that was mostly steady, and mostly synchronized with that sound... but it's been a while. Maybe I'll try again, when/if I reach that priority in my futzing schedule. I'm joking. It's not scheduled. When I have to budget my "free" time between fixing broken work tools or fixing broken play toys, well, the work stuff gets to function slightly more than the play stuff. So, anyway, that's why you'll never see a bug report with my name on it. I wouldn't even begin to know how to tell that a bug -- if it actually was a bug -- should be reported to the app creators, or to the X project, or to the KDE people... or ... to SuSE.
From my perspective, it's far better that I don't clog the system with amateurish/naive attempts.
Well, nobody read this far, and it's past my bed-time, so </counter-rant> G'night all. /kevin OH! wait. I almost forgot... please don't make excuses for OpenOffice, and how it's the early release. It isn't. It's the same code that is in StarOffice 6.x. When people are using tools for years that have not yet reached release 1.0, then something that is at release 6 is quite mature. - -