* dep (dep@linuxandmain.com) [020526 18:54]: ::begin Ben Rosenberg's quote: ::| Well, I removed every Ximian rpm on the machine and all it's config ::| files. I installed the Gnome rpm's from the supp. directory on ::| SuSE's ftp server..all of them. And you know what I am beginning to ::| thing that having Evolution 1.0.5 running after the last upgrade ::| prior to the apt fiasco was a fluke. Screw Gnome.. :: ::the tales are many and terrifying that have to do with dueling gnomes. ::a good friend of mine one day said to me, "my sister's grandchildren ::will be telling their children of the tragic day that their great ::uncle michael installed ximian gnome on debian potato." some of the ::worst, though, have to do with duels between the red hat network's ::update service and red carpet. there are recorded cases where they're ::installing and uninstalling their own and each other's stuff *at the ::same time*! and this is going to get worse and worse and worse as ::distributions and NDEs (non-distribution entities) all increase the ::apparent sophistication of their update services, which increasingly ::tie the user not just to binaries but to binaries from the ::distributor only. which will fubar linux in general in many ways, not ::the lest being the functional equivalent of forking ala the unices. ::they're cutting the baby into pieces, never stopping to think that ::when they do that all they can possibly end up with is a piece of a ::dead baby. Yep. And the answer to it all for me is KDE. I've never had those issues with KDE..even KDE3 worked with little effort for me. Gnome is such a clusterfuck as Clint Eastwood said in Heartbreak Ridge. :) -=Ben --=====-----=====-- mailto:ben@whack.org --=====-- If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. -GC --=====-----=====--

begin Matthew Johnson's quote: | Not to mention Gnome ripping off OS X with that dock. What does | amaze me is some newbies trying to act like old hands by using | Gnome, when in my experience the experienced people use KDE (or | some other window manager). well, look. kde has taken a lot of stuff from the ui design of windows. this makes some sense in that it's something that users who are new to linux will not find intimidating -- they might be a little more puzzled with, say, afterstep. so it's not really fair to accuse anybody of copying, because it's pretty universally done (unless you want to talk, say, the current enlightenment cvs tree). and it was rms who a few months ago remarked that looking to windows for a ui design was not something the gnomes should be doing, when the mac did a number of things far more elegantly. agree or not, it's a valid point of view. there are a lot of people who use kde, but there are also a lot of experienced people who use gnome -- for instance, those who have hardwired the emacs key bindings into their dna, which can be brought happily to gnome but not kde (yet; 3.1 is supposed to be far more configurable in this regard); also, those who made their decision for political reasons a long time ago. certainly, kde would not be as good as it is were there not gnome breathing down its neck. and gnome development would be different, and slower, were there no kde. competition is good. rehashing a battle that was all the rage two years ago, though, is probably just spinning the wheels. and in that there *are* people who have gnome, evolution, etc., running well on their machines, a problem getting it all to work properly on any one machine, group of machines, or with any particular distribution suggests that the problem might not necessarily be with gnome itself. my view is that a good part of it is due to everybody's disparate crackpot schemes for updating binaries, be it YOU, red hat network, or red carpet. such systems simply *must* make some assumptions that may or may not be accurate, but that are almost certainly not accurate if the user has tinkered at all with his installation. this is entirely separate from the issue of the quality of the applications or desktops being installed. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.

Well said dep. I may be one of the few who use Gnome/Ximian but let me say i LOVE it. Only Galeon gives me problems but hey i use opera so that's not

Just out of interest, what sort of problems does Galeon give you? And what version of it are you using? -- James Ogley, Unix Systems Administrator, Pinnacle Insurance Plc james.ogley@pinnacle.co.uk www.pinnacle.co.uk +44 (0) 20 8731 3619 Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 8.0) Updated GNOME RPMs for SuSE Linux: www.usr-local-bin.org *********************************************************************** CONFIDENTIALITY. This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to another person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Pinnacle Insurance Plc. If you have received this e-mail in error please immediately notify our Helpdesk on +44 (0) 20 8207 9555. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com **********************************************************************

Crashes when i try to open up it's preferences.

That used to happen to me with older versions (pre-1.0 I think) - it was caused by the LANG variable being set either incorrectly (ie to a value that didn't have a corresponding translation) or not being set at all...

Not sure of the version. I'll have to check. (I'm at work now)

Okey doke, suffice to say that my current setup works fine, if I can help you with Galeon at all, I will (IMHO it's a far superior browser to Opera, plus it's fully GNOME compliant, so if you're using GNOME, it's worth the effort - again IMHO) -- James Ogley, Unix Systems Administrator, Pinnacle Insurance Plc james.ogley@pinnacle.co.uk www.pinnacle.co.uk +44 (0) 20 8731 3619 Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 8.0) Updated GNOME RPMs for SuSE Linux: www.usr-local-bin.org *********************************************************************** CONFIDENTIALITY. This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to another person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Pinnacle Insurance Plc. If you have received this e-mail in error please immediately notify our Helpdesk on +44 (0) 20 8207 9555. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com **********************************************************************

At 15:12 27/05/2002, James Ogley wrote:

...

Crashes when i try to open up it's preferences.

Thanks James. I set the language on the gnome chooser (the graphical login) to english (british) and that cured it. Clifford

On Monday 27 May 2002 03.51, dep wrote:

apparent sophistication of their update services, which increasingly tie the user not just to binaries but to binaries from the distributor only.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' Kindly explain how using an update service to install binaries removes the option of installing from source. Also explain how an open system can ever preclude user's modifying things so as to be able to install programs that use features from a different system. If you intend by the above remark to suggest that while it is possible, most people aren't knowledgable to do so, then I put it to you that you haven't the faintest clue what the linux movement is all about. Users who can't resolve conflicts between redhat's services and ximian's will always have the option of seeking out people who are. Why? Because the source is there and freely modifyable by anyone. If you don't know there will be someone else who does. Linux won't be affected by this in the least. RedHat or ximian or other distributors maybe, but not linux. //Anders -- I swear I do declare - how did you get that there?

On Monday 27 May 2002 06.51, Ben Rosenberg wrote:

Well, how come when I uninstall all the Ximian stuff and remove the Gnome directories and shared files..Gnome software will still puke on itself and not give a valid reason like " error in directory <blah> with config <blah>."

This is the one thing about PC's that make this crap such a pain. One of things I wish developers would do is make error messages that one can understand.

I got rid of Ximian completely and installed the SuSE RPM's and deleted all the config files. I let it restart itself and I get the same error. This is just goofy.

I'm not saying Ximian is great, I gave up on that POC when I got circular, unresolvable (short of manually tampering with the rpm db) dependencies. And I also have no clue as to what your problem is, I don't use gnome myself. KDE (or afterstep, if I'm on an older comp) is better AFAIAC. I was just replying to dep and his conspiracy theories. I don't think that the problems you're seeing are in any way connected with any forking of the linux distributions. You're seeing a bug, not the death of linux. That's all I meant :) //Anders -- I swear I do declare - how did you get that there?

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.

the tales are many and terrifying that have to do with dueling gnomes. a good friend of mine one day said to me, "my sister's grandchildren will be telling their children of the tragic day that their great uncle michael installed ximian gnome on debian potato." some of the worst, though, have to do with duels between the red hat network's update service and red carpet. there are recorded cases where they're installing and uninstalling their own and each other's stuff *at the same time*! and this is going to get worse and worse and worse as distributions and NDEs (non-distribution entities) all increase the apparent sophistication of their update services, which increasingly tie the user not just to binaries but to binaries from the distributor only. which will fubar linux in general in many ways, not the lest being the functional equivalent of forking ala the unices. they're cutting the baby into pieces, never stopping to think that when they do that all they can possibly end up with is a piece of a dead baby.

Funeral march is playing when I write this, kind of fitting lol. I believe much more strongly in the Open Source nature of Linux, and that it will prevent what happened to Unix, however it maybe close. Guess it may get so bad as to kill Gnome...Then others will turn to KDE, nad lets hope the same does not happen there. Matt