On Friday 07 October 2005 18:25, James Ogley wrote:
What have I done wrong. I want firefox to come up when I click a link in evolution. I do not want or like epiphany .
What have you done wrong? You've monkeyed around without knowing what you're doing.
Change your GNOME web browser to Firefox. Sorted.
How does one find out what one is doing, without monkeying around? Information about Linux stuff, on the web, doesn't seem to be tagged for freshness, with expiry dates and applicability notes. Just reading everything to be found on a topic, before doing any monkeying has never done me much good... and I'm one of those people with a need-to-read (I even re-read the label on the cereal box if there's nothing else handy...). I've found that wide reading means reading of lots of contradictory and outdated stuff, along with stuff that might be valuable. I do it, but these days only to get the general flavor of the area that currently has me stymied, not for specific steps, since following steps from two (or ten) contradictory HowTos or extracted from 2002 Debian mailing lists (hey, if that's what Google puts up, that's what I read) is a recipe for trouble as well. Whenever I start anything I haven't done before, I read man pages and look for HowTos, but I invariably get into trouble because - without experience - the multiple ways to do anything in Linux don't sort themselves into neat categories. Later, when somebody on the list helps me to dig myself out, it usually involves backtracking, uninstalling and deleting 47 things that I didn't need to do, but which conflict with the one path that I've (or the coach) settled on. I can short-circuit the process sometimes, by just jumping in, getting in trouble, and then getting help to extract myself. That approach at least saves me from reading dozens or hundreds of pages that don't apply. :-) On average, it takes me many weeks or months to sort out any installation/configuration that doesn't accidentally go perfectly the first time. Thus, if I start trying to do things shortly after I install the latest SuSE, then I may actually have time to get to a resolution on some little project. If I start a couple or three months after the last SuSE release, then my shambles remains and my motivation wanes (because there's a new release coming up that might fix it...) until I install the next SuSE, and likely it gets fixed automatically... or else it's now a completely different problem that prevents whatever I wanted from working. For example, having installed 10.0 two nights ago, it will now take me at least a couple of hours to get DVD-player stuff working (including finding my decss stuff, finding un-pre-broken rpm* of xine that's intended for 10.0 and not some earlier SuSE, reading through old SLE posts to get the procedure straight, agonizing over not finding the rpms where they were the last time - or finding them only for 9.3 -, etc., whereas you probably have a script that does it in ten minutes, including download time. But it took me three or four months with SuSE 9.0, a couple of years ago, because of all the wrong paths I took (including two months to get apt-get working, because that was how the most consistent and encouraging thread in SLE explained it). Different world-view. Different talents. Different use for the computer. I know it's not pretty, but that's what you are dealing with, here, and I'm not alone. When Linux went beyond pure command-line geek toy, people like me came out of the woodwork, and most of us don't have the sense to go away. :-) Kevin (* I hold out for rpms because I don't want to undermine the rpm database and YaST's/YOU's usefulness)