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The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron
Your editor is not always known for making life easy for himself. Perhaps
one of the most clear examples of masochistic behavior would be a certain
preference for running development distributions on mission-critical
systems. That said, your editor has stuck with a stable distribution on
his laptop through a round of intensive travel earlier this year. But that
was too easy, so, shortly before heading off to the Linux Foundation's
Collaboration Summit, the laptop got moved to the Ubuntu "Hardy Heron"
distribution. Needless to say, there have been some interesting ups and
downs (literally) since then.
There is always a certain thrill that comes with upgrading a system and finding that important features no longer work. In this case, the problem was suspend and resume, which your editor uses heavily. In fact, the system would suspend just fine - as long as one failed to notice that, behind the cleverly darkened screen, the laptop's backlight had been left on. Needless to say, this new behavior is not helpful if one's goal is to save power while the system is suspended, but it gets worse than that. Your editor discovered this nice surprise after carrying the computer in a backpack for a few hours; by the time it came out, it was almost too hot to hold. Happily, no permanent damage appears to have been done. Or, perhaps, unhappily. Your editor has been looking for an excuse to get a new laptop for a while. The problem turned out to be a HAL configuration error combined with a strange internal model number which makes your editor's Thinkpad X31 different from, seemingly, every other X31 on the planet. Once your editor found the bug report and attached a "me too" comment, the solution was quick in coming. On the net, one can find complaints that Ubuntu is unresponsive to bug reports, but that was certainly not the experience here. As an aside, it seems worth noting that life seems to have gotten more complicated, with a lot more code wrapped around the kernel than there once was. The problematic configuration file was /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-ibm.fdi - not a place where your editor, who is not a HAL expert, would have thought to look. That, it seems, is the price of more capable hardware and software, but sometimes your editor pines for the days when it seemed possible to carry a full understanding of the system within a single brain. GNOME developers are (perhaps unjustly in recent years) known for taking a minimal approach to configuration options. That can be irritating, but just as annoying is their tendency to reset the options they do provide over major updates. Once suspend and resume work, your editor demands something else of a laptop when traveling: absolute silence. So the return of beeps to gnome-terminal was not appreciated. Those were easily silenced, but the GNOME developers also saw fit to bring back the blinking cursor - and they took away the configuration option which abolishes that intolerable feature. Your editor first ran into the unstoppable blink with Rawhide; a query to the developers there turned up a quick answer. It seems that the GNOME developers have decided to create a single, system-wide parameter to control blinking cursors. Now, your editor approves of the concept of being able to turn off that behavior everywhere with a single switch - but only as long as that switch isn't hidden where nobody will ever find it. In this case, the GNOME developers have taken this feature, wrapped it in old newspapers, and stashed it behind the furnace in the basement; then they put a trunk on top of it. It is a rare user who will find it unassisted. In the hopes that it may save one or two readers from some time spent with search engine, your editor will now divulge the top-secret incantation which turns blinking cursors off:
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink false
Naturally, a terminal window is required to run this command. It would have been nice if the developers who packaged this code for Hardy Heron had found a way to smooth over this change, but no such luck; as far as your editor can tell, no distributor has made that effort. Another bit of fun is that your editor is no longer able to set the desktop background; the relevant configuration windows are ineffective. In this case, it would appear that the task of implementing the user's background choices have been moved to nautilus - just the place your editor would have thought to look for it. As it happens, your editor has no use for file managers and does not run nautilus - and is punished with an immutable Ubuntu-brown background for that sin. Happily, your editor still knows how to run xsetroot. All of the above is a set of relatively minor grumbles, all of which are rectified in relatively short order. Once those details have been taken care of, the Hardy Heron release works quite well. One of the biggest aggravations from previous upgrades - having OpenOffice.org reformat the slides in all of your editor's presentations - was not present this time around. Hopefully we are moving into an era where "it didn't mangle my documents" is not something considered worthy of mention. There was one very nice surprise as well. Your editor's laptop previously required almost 12 watts of power when running unplugged. This laptop is not at the bleeding edge of current technology, so the amount of time it was able to run without a recharge has been dropping for a while. With the Hardy release, steady-state power consumption has dropped to just over 9 watts - a big improvement. The credit for this change belongs to developers at all levels: kernel, applications, distributors, etc. The end result is a system which runs much more efficiently, and that is a good thing. All told, your editor is reasonably content; this distribution looks like one which might just be worth keeping around. That's a good thing, since Ubuntu plans to maintain it as a "long-term support" release. Not that your editor intends to make much use of that long-term support; there should be a new development series starting soon, after all. One of the nice things about development distributions is that support never ends as long as one stays on the treadmill and the project itself remains alive. (Log in to post comments)
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:11 UTC (Wed) by shredwheat (subscriber, #4188) [Link] How does one determine the amount of wattage a laptop system is using? Does this require some external device, or is there a number buried somewhere in a /sys like location?
Determining power usage Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:18 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I just run PowerTOP. That's a tool which anybody trying to get the most out of their laptop should have...
[Offtopic] Make Money Fast! Posted Apr 23, 2008 15:43 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390) [Link] I just noticed that our editor now has unique handle and number in his comments: ... 16:18 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)Has our editor thought about selling these? You could charge money to be know as: ... 17:53 UTC (Wed) by descartes (mathematician, #314159265)Though maybe there is a reason I don't run my own business...
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:21 UTC (Wed) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] On x86 systems ACPI provides an estimate of battery power usage. powertop can show you that.
Blinking Cursors, FileManager = Desktop Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:20 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] Wow, the Gnome developers appear to be implementing many of the supremely stupid features of MS Windows. Guess I'll be staying with XFCE a good while longer.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:42 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
That's. Just. Hideous. Does the GNOME team not like their users? (Ducks to avoid barrage of flames) Disclosure: I use KDE, but I guarantee it has its fair share of annoyances not unlike our editor's "strobe light" situation in GNOME. As for the desktop wallpaper/background, well, I have to insist that GNOME got it wrong. Routing all users to a file browser application (Nautilus) to change desktop appearance is unacceptable. Heck, even Microsoft Windows does this right: Right-click on the desktop and bring up a context menu. How difficult can that be?
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:00 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] There is a perfectly good GUI for that setting, as with all the GConf settings, on my Fedora system it's Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration editor. It includes search* so that you can quickly find settings you want. You are of course also welcome to write a GUI configuration tool that has exactly the fourteen settings you think should be configurable, without also listing the hundreds of other settings you think only idiots would change, but since everyone's list is different your tool may have a limited audience... * although in this case you'll find a bug, searching for "cursor" doesn't match the relevant configuration setting even though it obviously should. Some other entries about cursors are found instead, someone more patient than me could investigate whether this is fixed in a newer GNOME than my 2.20.3 Also, you DO right click on the desktop and bring up a context menu item to change the background in GNOME. But what are you clicking on? When Nautilus is running (which is the default for GNOME users) then the background is owned by Nautilus. Since our Grumpy Editor wasn't running Nautilus there was nothing to click on except the empty root window.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:15 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Also, you DO right click on the desktop and bring up a context menu item to change the background in GNOME. But what are you clicking on? When Nautilus is running (which is the default for GNOME users) then the background is owned by Nautilus. Since our Grumpy Editor wasn't running Nautilus there was nothing to click on except the empty root window. How about System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance? There's a nifty "Background" tab there that used to work; now it silently fails to do what it says it's going to do.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:24 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Presumably because it tells Nautilus to set the background, and your Nautilus is long dead. Is that outcome a bug? Yes, perhaps. But it's going to be on the priority scale somewhere between "GNOME does not show correct free disk space on my 20 Petabyte USB RAID array" and "GNOME world map is wrong for my planet, Neptune". My guess would be that if you don't write a really good patch of your own, any bug would be "fixed" by just greying out that entire panel when Nautilus is disabled.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 12:25 UTC (Wed) by mightyduck (subscriber, #23760) [Link] This is a pretty rude response. You GNOME people really hate your users! Disclaimer: I'm using KDE.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 13:36 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I think we are LWN subscribers here in the first place, not "GNOME people" or anyone writing in any official capacity. It's not an interview with a GNOME developer or something like that.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 18:57 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I don't see this has a huge problem. Just use gconf-editor I find using that a lot easier then navigating KDE's option menus. Seriously. It's not that bad. For example for blinking cursors you go: ctrl-f checkmark "search also key names" type 'blink' hit 'enter' First two finds are: /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink_time /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink The first one tells me: "Length of the cursor blink cycle, in milliseconds" Soo.. no that's not it. The second one tells me: "Whether the cursor should blink" I uncheck it. The change is immediate. That's not that bad. It's a obscure setting that few people want. Why clutter up everything with a billion options? I can understand getting irritated that previously options that are set get unset, of course. But we don't need a 1001 GUIs or windows with a billion icons on them representing every single obscure option imaginable. It's just not worth it. Seriously. People who are a serious Gnome users need to use gconf-editor. There are descriptions for most options that are not blindingly obvious. For example; clicking through metacity's options I found how to enable it's compositing mode and to enable low-resource mode. For nautilus I found how to change the 'my computer' name. All sorts of other stuff.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 24, 2008 2:17 UTC (Thu) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link] Sorry, but I cannot begin to describe how wrong I think you are, and thank you for putting it very concisely. You exactly hit one of the nerves that made me go "fed up" with Gnome a while back, and switch to KDE. I've been a happier person for it.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 24, 2008 22:53 UTC (Thu) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link] as much as i hate the karma system, i have to +1 this comment. so spot on, it's like you copy & pasted my brain.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 25, 2008 18:22 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] Or you can go to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Cursor Blinking ...
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 14:58 UTC (Wed) by ernstp (subscriber, #13694) [Link] You have disabled one of the most basic components of Gnome (Nautilus) and can't tolerate any glitches... ?
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 15:05 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] If I turn off the file manager, I expect not to have a file manager. I was surprised to find that it breaks seemingly unrelated functionality, especially given that things did work in previous releases. The breaking of something which once worked is called a "regression," normally.So be it, this one is not that big of a deal. I can't see my background anyway (which is why I see no point in having nautilus cluttering it up), and xsetroot is sufficient to clear away the obnoxious default color scheme.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 16:45 UTC (Wed) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link] Is is still a regression if the GNOME developers never intended old releases to work that way? I would have thought nautilus was something GNOME developers could have counted on being around as a fundamental piece of infrastructure on which they can build on. Any GNOME developers out there?
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:19 UTC (Wed) by NCunningham (subscriber, #6457) [Link] (Not a Gnome developer, but I am a developer) It doesn't matter how the developer intends the software to be used. Users will always come up with ways of using it that you never imagined. What counts is whether the knobs you provide for tuning your software work as advertised, regardless of which combination of settings the user tries. If they find a combination where something doesn't work as intended, you have a bug. If they find a combination where something works as intended, but not as desired, well... that's a feature request. In this case, it's a bug because the advertised functionality doesn't work as advertised in these circumstances.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 23, 2008 19:20 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well the guy that was asking the question asked 'If it was a regression', not 'if was a bug'. It may be a bug, but it's not a regression. It's always been like this as far as I know. It shouldn't be hard to fix, so file a bug report and let it go. They fix it or they don't.
nautilus =? infrastructure Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:25 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] I don't run nautilus either. I don't want unrelated features built on it as "infrastructure". By all means put desktop file management features there. That's what it's for. Me, I use "mv", and prefer it. So, yes, this *is* a regression. Any core dependency on nautilus is a regression, just as would be any core dependency on tomboy or beagle. They're programs I don't happen to use, and that I see no reason to have installed. There are other programs that do behind-the-scenes work. Gnome-session seems like a not unreasonable place for this bit.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 28, 2008 6:54 UTC (Mon) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Yes. Plain and simple yes. If doing that USED to work, but doesn't work TODAY, then it is a regression. It matters not how the developers, or anyone else, INTENDED it to work, what matters is actual behaviour. Actual behaviour is that right-clicking the desktop and setting the wallpaper USED to work, even for people without Nautilus running. Today it no longer works. That is a regression. It's not a major issue or anything, not as if this makes the computer unusable, but a regression nevertheless.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 28, 2008 13:40 UTC (Mon) by superstoned (subscriber, #33164) [Link] Hehe, talking of regressions, you'd like KDE 4.0 ;-) More serious, this is a weird thing. I would personally say it's good to reuse code (use Nautilus code to paint the background) but it was done wrong (needs Nautilus running somehow). Should be factored out in a common library, I would presume. Imho despite all it's shortcomings, KDE does things better in this regard - the infrastructure is in order. Let's see if our Grumpy friend will get acquainted with KDE again when 4.1 is out - see if he likes it.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 29, 2008 0:09 UTC (Tue) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] I personally don't mind minor regressions much. I deal, and like our grumpy editor I like living on the edge, and I'm fully aware that that means suffering bruises and cuts every now and then. I was just responding to the (imho!) very misguided idea that something that stops working somehow isn't a regression if the developer never "intended" it to work in the first place. I do indeed like KDE4, bugs and all.
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 24, 2008 9:54 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I don't know how it is in Ubuntu, but in Fedora 9, removing bluetooth support removes nautilus:
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 24, 2008 13:26 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] > You don't make one of the most basic components depend on libraries for optional hardware. By most basic components I guess you mean gvfs? Nautilus is not the only dependency for that (at least not in the future) as it replaces gnome-vfs...
Changing backgrounds Posted Apr 24, 2008 15:49 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] "one of the most basic components" referred to nautilus. I should have used quotes.
Hmm... Why? Posted May 12, 2008 8:25 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] You don't make one of the most basic components depend on libraries for optional hardware. Interesting. Why it's Ok for optional software (like kerberos) but not Ok for optional hardware (like bluez)? And if you'll say that you should make everything optional removable then the only sane answer is Gentoo... Ubuntu, Fedora and other popular distributions are NOT Gentoo and are NOT designed to allow mix-and-match use. They are designed to WORK. Out of the box. They are doing it quite well - unless you are trying to change them too much.
Hmm... Why? Posted May 15, 2008 6:24 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] Interesting you mention Gentoo. That's in fact what I was going to mention as well. Binary distributions often have compile-time support choices that force library dependencies if enabled. It was apparently judged worthwhile to enable bluetooth support for those that had it, even at the cost of forcing the library dependency. The option would be disabling bluetooth support even for those that needed it. This is the kind of choices binary distributions make all the time. Among other things, it's why most binary distributions favor one desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, whatever) over another, even if they have binaries for both. Inevitably there will be packages with compile-time enabled options to better integrate with more than one, and a binary distribution will, by working policy borne of necessity, tend to enable the support for their "default" desktop while disabling the other, thus not forcing the installation of their non-default desktops, while forcing the installation of at least major components of their default choice due to the build-time linking they enabled. The only way around this sort of thing for a binary distro is shipping multiple choices, either as different distribution flavors, ubuntu/kubuntu, etc, or by shipping multiple versions of the same package (say vim and vim-minimal, to cite one example I'm familiar with from my time a few years ago on Mandrake). Either way that's a limited workaround, because it doesn't deal with the more obscure choices, which will tend to be enabled or disabled based on individual distribution policy for that sort of dependency and the functionality hit taken when disabling it. While they certainly have their own faults, source-based distributions shouldn't have this one, at least not to anywhere near the same extent, because being source based, the choice of whether to support the extra functionality and take the extra dependencies is made at the user end, at compile and install time. That's what Gentoo's USE flags are all about. If you're using a binary distribution, you're choosing a package set where untold hundreds, more like thousands, of these choices have been already made for you. If you choose one more or less compatible with your usage, purposes and preferences, a good share of them will be the same choices you would have made anyway and you've saved yourself the hassle of compiling everything from source at the cost of, probably, a handful of packages that get installed as dependencies that you'd not need had you compiled each package with just the support you needed. Hopefully, you find one fairly close to what you want and you have just those few extra packages and interdependencies. But, you WILL get those few. It comes with the territory. It's a tradeoff you choose to take when you choose a binary distribution. If you don't like it, choose a from source distribution that allows you to control such things... at the cost of compiling everything yourself. Your choice. When it comes to my computer, I'm definitely and admittedly a control freak, and I had decent hardware, so I chose the extra control. Others don't mind the loss of functionality and customizability, as long as it "just works". For them, from all I read, GNOME based Ubuntu tends to be a pretty good solution, as are (in a different way) various proprietaryware solutions, where you pay your money and get a more or less turnkey solution they expect you you to take more or less as is and not be too interested in poking away at the internals of (indeed, it tends to be against the EULA to do so). If they are lucky, it'll meet their needs and wants as well as my Gentoo with KDE has for me, and they'll be as happy with the results as I've been. =8^) Duncan
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:25 UTC (Wed) by alvherre (subscriber, #18730) [Link] Agreed. I'm a long-time GNOME user and while I'm happy with many of the improvements in every release, it seems the developers find ways to annoy everyone all the time. I have no need for Nautilus at all. In fact I'm not too worried about having to use gconf-editor or whatever to change the appareance of my desktop; but the fact that not running Nautilus means that I get *no background image at all* is disturbing. Regarding blinking cursors, I am not worried, given that the switch from gnome-terminal to xterm is the first thing I do when setting up my desktop. Oops, I just noticed that I get a blinking cursor on Epiphany for editing this comment ... yikes.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 14:34 UTC (Wed) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link] My prolonged exposure to GNOME has resulted in apathy: I don't care about the desktop settings anymore. I guess it's inevitable. To caricaturize: if I like a setting, it's almost certainly gone in the next release, so there's no point to set oneself for disappointment. That being said, while I can no longer easily configure myself a nonblinking cursor, at least I can still put text as white on black. When this option is gone, too, I guess my frustration level will finally reach its all-time peak, and I will dream of murderous rampages in GNOME HQ. The single best thing to have happened to GNOME lately is compiz. I don't talk about the bling, although I somewhat appreciate that as well, especially whole-desktop zoom. What I am talking about is the ability to drag windows from one desktop to another again. Every day that I have been allowed to keep using this feature, I have dutifully sacrificed a chicken and gone to bed as a happier man. Is there nothing that can convince GNOME guys to stop removing settings? Would someone at least write a GNOME advanced GUI that will have all the settings the devs choose to remove? I think it'd be a hit!
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:34 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] I have watched the text edit mode setting for emacs key bindings gradually fade away. First the dialog-box checkbox disappeared. Then the on-line documentation on the setting in gconf was deleted! The first could be attributed to streamlining. The second smacks of malice. When emacs edit key binding ultimately goes away, as it seems it must, I suppose I will finally switch to KDE. I wonder if there will be anything to miss, then.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:56 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] By the way, the gconf key required appears to be desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme and the value that still works to fix the key assignments is "Emacs".
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 11:32 UTC (Thu) by jfranks (subscriber, #1213) [Link] Thank you, thank you, thank you! I thought this was lost.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 13:25 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] Through Gtk themeing you can actually set Gtk text widgets to use any key theme (RC file) you like: http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.12/GtkSettings.html#... The above mentioned setting just tells it to use a pre-installed Emacs keybindings theme RC file from here: /usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc If you look at it, it should be fairly obvious how to create your own keyboard themes.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 22:33 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] > I guess it's inevitable. To caricaturize: if I like a setting, it's almost certainly gone in the next release, so there's no point to set oneself for disappointment. For me, it happened only one time — during the switch from Gnome 1.4 to Gnome 2.0. After an initial shock and an understanding that it's really going to be this way from that point, I've *so* switched to KDE :) Don't like being tortured this way. They should have renamed the project to something different, really.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 28, 2008 9:23 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] > Would someone at least write a GNOME advanced GUI that will have all the > settings the devs choose to remove? That's called gconf-editor. Yes, really -- see above explanation of how to change the settings for blinking cursor (if you don't use normal configuration in System menu that is). It is not that hard.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted May 7, 2008 11:04 UTC (Wed) by celtic_hackr (guest, #47391) [Link] So, Gnome's answer for removing obvious features is to go to gconf-editor, but this doesn't appear to be in the menu, so one would have to dig to find this, just so they can set the desktop background? And while on this rant, who would ever look for desktop settings in a file manager, and why would you make the file manager the system settings manager? Isn't that the job for a system settings manager and not a file manager? I run Linux Mint, so it's a Ubuntu clone (on steriods). I use KDE, simply because everything is just too hard to do in Gnome, for my taste. When I want to change something, I want to be able to do it intuitively, not by having to google for it. Life is complicated enough without having to make it more so. GUIs should be painless and made for the simpleminded. Not that KDE is all that, there are certainly things that are hard to do in KDE, but it's far superior to Gnome. I even opened a Gnome desktop to test changing the background. There was a way to do it from a right click on the desktop (since I didn't disable Nautilus), but something running in the background made the window come up so slowly, and every other tab (fonts, animation, etc) in the configuration screen refused to open. Gnome is a real dog on this <1 year old laptop, but to be fair it was the third X session running, but when I switch it to KDE it runs fine. I see comments in here about disabling things in Gnome to get the speed performance back. Sorry, that's the wrong approach. It seems Gnome has taken all the bad ideas from Windows and implemented them, only making them worse. Of course, our Grumpy editor has made his life harder by his own action, which any normal person would have probably thought was innocuous. Who'd a thunk it? Remove a file manager and remove your desktop!? I'll bet adding back Nautilus won't easily fix those problems though, and probably the only way to properly fix removing Nautilus is to re-install the OS? Wow, just like Windows. Great job, Gnome guys!!! So my advice to you Grumpy Editor is switch to KDE, it's not perfect but I like it.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:36 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] Oh yes. Hideous! Giving users an option instead of making them recompile the source code. MacOS X, widely claimed as one of the most user friendly environments, in its 10.5 version introduced a new look for the Dock. Users who don't like that look had an option: open a command line and enter a nasty command. But they did at least have that option. Windows, another "user friendly" environment, has about a zillion networking options hidden inside a command line tool called "netsh". Displaying all the options instead of a selection of options gives you interfaces like the older KDE 2 versions, or Gnome 1, or Gnome 2's gconf-editor, or the UI Joel Spolsky uses as the "worst ever" example: the Windows version of wget, where the UI is just every possible wget option on a series of tabs in a dialog box. Instead of all these hard to use options, real users edit the source code and rebuild, like with the "dwm" window manager.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:56 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] That's. Just. Hideous. Does the GNOME team not like their users? (Ducks to avoid barrage of flames) From the brief and unpleasant interactions I've had with GNOME developers, I would conclude that they do not like their users. Well, I voted with my feet. XFCE for me, and my kids independently chose KDE after trying GNOME and KDE. Unfortunately, some GNOME annoyances are difficult to escape such as the stupid file browser that hangs for 10 seconds in large directories. Firefox 3 uses GNOME (well, I guess GTK) widgets by default. Here's the magical firefox incantation to get a usable file browser again:
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 13:11 UTC (Wed) by jorism (subscriber, #21807) [Link] Thanks a lot for the magical firefox incantation! If I use the standard file browser to pick the application "gv" in /usr/bin, I have to wait about 50 seconds until the contents of /usr/bin is displayed (!!!). I always thought that this bug would be noticed by many people and thus get fixed soon, so I never bothered reporting it. I now realize that I have been waiting for a fix for more than two years already... and in the mean time, I even got used to this strange behaviour. But your trick reduces the waiting time from 50s to about 0s...! I wonder what the standard firefox file browser is doing with the list of files that takes so long...anyway, thanks a lot for this workaround!
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 14:26 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I always thought that this bug would be noticed by many people and thus get fixed soon, so I never bothered reporting it. In the spirit of civic-mindedness, I opened bug 430532 with mozilla.org.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:51 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] While I agree that the GTK+ file browser could be faster... if Firefox bothered to integrate with the GNOME platform at all then instead of picking 'gv' from a /usr/bin directory containing (on my system) 3740 files (a pathological condition if ever I saw one) then you'd just pick it from a dropdown of other applications capable of opening image files.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 18:41 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] instead of picking 'gv' from a /usr/bin directory containing [...] you'd just pick it from a dropdown of other applications capable of opening image files. Ye gods, no! That means that Firefox would totally ignore software it doesn't know about or recognize. It means that if you're not part of the GNOME Universe, you may as well not exist, which is the most objectionable aspect of GNOME anyway! It would also do nothing to solve situations that really need arbitrary files, like "File : Open"
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 2:45 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] Nothing prevents there from being a way to add arbitrary programs to the list. This user interface has already been designed, fer-christsake, it's just up to mozilla.com to use it. Now you should both be happy; you who want to pick some random image viewing program that doesn't fit in with the rest of the desktop out of a directory of 3500 other files; and the ordinary user who just wants to view an image! http://imagebin.ca/view/KGirIbR1.html for a screenshot...
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 7:43 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] This user interface has already been designed, fer-christsake, it's just up to mozilla.com to use it. But that would introduce a dependency on GNOME rather than just GTK. And that's completely unacceptable to those of us who do not use GNOME.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 7:48 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] No no no it absolutely would not create a dependency on GNOME. And people who don't understand that it wouldn't should quite frankly shut the hell up instead of spreading more FUD.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 9:09 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] OK, sorry, I didn't realize the "helper program..." dialog was part of base GTK. I still dislike the interface, but for personal reasons rather than because it's part of GNOME.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 23:00 UTC (Thu) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link] "spreading FUD" generally implies purposefully doing so. correcting people who are simply mistaken does not deserve a "shut the hell up".
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 4:44 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] And those of us who don't use GNOME are left out in the cold?
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 5:00 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] Just use Epiphany. I really don't understand why anyone would use Firefox with GNOME. I particularly can't understand it why someone, after making that choice, would then complain about FireFox's lack of system integration...
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 15:57 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] From the brief and unpleasant interactions I've had with GNOME developers, I would conclude that they do not like their users.I think they mostly like Microsoft's users, which is where a lot of the discontent comes from. It's a lot easier to keep make-believe users that you don't really have happy than it is to please the ones that are actually using the software. As a result, features are added (and removed) that no-one actually requested.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 19:04 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] *zing* Yow! :-) I must put the parent post in my .sig.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 0:20 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I would definitely agree with that comment, especially in my own pet-peeve case: file-selector widget sorting. GTK/Gnome has the setting to sort folders separately from files fixed in stone (well, in the source code, but it might as well be in granite), with a snarky little comment about how this is the One True Way and it will Always Be That Way. Fortunately, a little snip-snip with the editor, and a recompile, and the One True Way disappears into the ether. :) When I say I want things sorted by last-modified date, that's exactly what I mean, d*** it. It doesn't matter that the last-modified thing is a folder or not--whatever it is, put it at the top (or the bottom, if the sort is reversed)!
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 1:59 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] Could you please post, where I have to change this? Patch or filename+number would be OK. TIA.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 10:53 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] When I patched it out before, it was lines 5644 to 5707 of gtk+-2.10.14/gtk/gtkfilechooserdefault.c. You'll probably be able to see what to cut out and rearrange (essentially, remove the COMPARE_DIRECTORIES macro calls). I'm grabbing 2.12.9 right now, and I'll see if it's the same way--if so, I'll post a diff.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 11:04 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] It is still the same in 2.12.9. Following is a patch. I didn't choose to remove the definition for the COMPARE_DIRECTORIES macro, because it won't make any difference in the generated code, but you can take it out if you want to be extra-neat. --- gtk+-2.12.9-orig/gtk/gtkfilechooserdefault.c 2008-04-24 09:57:46.000000000 -0700
+++ gtk+-2.12.9-modified/gtk/gtkfilechooserdefault.c 2008-04-24 09:59:23.000000000 -0700
@@ -6278,8 +6278,6 @@
GtkTreeIter *b,
gpointer user_data)
{
- COMPARE_DIRECTORIES;
- else
return strcmp (gtk_file_info_get_display_key (info_a), gtk_file_info_get_display_key (info_b));
}
@@ -6290,14 +6288,10 @@
GtkTreeIter *b,
gpointer user_data)
{
- COMPARE_DIRECTORIES;
- else
- {
gint64 size_a = gtk_file_info_get_size (info_a);
gint64 size_b = gtk_file_info_get_size (info_b);
return size_a > size_b ? -1 : (size_a == size_b ? 0 : 1);
- }
}
/* Sort callback for the mtime column */
@@ -6307,14 +6301,10 @@
GtkTreeIter *b,
gpointer user_data)
{
- COMPARE_DIRECTORIES;
- else
- {
GtkFileTime ta = gtk_file_info_get_modification_time (info_a);
GtkFileTime tb = gtk_file_info_get_modification_time (info_b);
return ta > tb ? -1 : (ta == tb ? 0 : 1);
- }
}
/* Callback used when the sort column changes. We cache the sort order for use
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 25, 2008 3:02 UTC (Fri) by regala (subscriber, #15745) [Link] What can be sure is that you people don't like people but yourselves. Read what you wrote, insulting fair developers who try to make a desktop environment for the people not you, you, you. Some project choose a way, a policy, some others, another and so one. So instead of spreading a hell of FUD just you and you and you there, hidden behind the pillar, just speak yourself what you are about to frentically write, and notice you are just among GNOME-haters here. Brain-masturbation isn't it ?
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:23 UTC (Wed) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] I thought "ooh good, I'll do that", went to about:config, and discovered it was already set that way. Hmm. I wonder when I did that? And how long it would have taken me to remember what needed sorting out if it had been silently reset on upgrade? And why anyone would tolerate, even for one second, an environment where that kind of rudeness was not only tolerated but expected...?
Config changes and upgrades Posted Apr 26, 2008 2:42 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] Surely you back up your home directory (which contains your Firefox profile on Linux) on upgrades? In any case, very few application upgrades would touch anything in your home directory, so this is something of a non-issue. I do recommend a home Wiki to track this sort of config change, which is particularly useful if you do a fresh install or want to do the same change on other machines.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted May 13, 2008 19:43 UTC (Tue) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] about:config and then set ui.allow_platform_file_picker to false.I'm a bit late, but thanks for that information. I can't stand that file picker and suffered silently for a long time.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 14:58 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link] Either you misunderstood him, or the editor was wrong. Nautilus _manages_ the desktop background. That means if you aren't running nautilus or tell nautilus to no manage backgrounds in gnome then you can't change the wallpaper. To change the wallpaper, right click on the desktop, and click "Change Desktop Background". Thats from the Ubuntu Hardy box I'm posting this message from.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 16:09 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] That means if you aren't running nautilus or tell nautilus to no[t] manage backgrounds in gnome then you can't change the wallpaper. So, to draw an analogy, that's like having to go to the stove in the kitchen to change the channel on the television in the living room. Sorry for being blunt, but I hope that my perspective on this interface may tell others more closely related to GNOME desktop development why it seems like A Bad Idea™. I do wish to thank our editor for his review, and also for taking the time out of his schedule to participate in the discussion.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:33 UTC (Wed) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] I'd actually say it's more akin to turning on your TV so you can change the time on your VCR. That's not the primary use of either piece of equipment, but it reuses the existing relationship among the pieces to great effect. In the case of Nautilus, since it's expected to be there as part of the overall GNOME environment and needs to handle root-window events anyway, having it take over the root window image doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. (That's roughly how Windows does it--it's the Explorer shell that handles it, IIRC.) Just as in my analogy, since a VCR pretty much has to have a TV attached so you can watch a tape, so reusing the TV for on-screen menu display isn't too much of a stretch. Are there VCRs that let you change the time w/out a TV? Of course! But that doesn't make the ones that require a TV for that purpose wrong. It just makes them different. Now as for the silent failure to change the background? That sounds a bug. That level of failure shouldn't be silent. Either a error/warning dialog should come up, or the tab should be greyed out when Nautilus isn't running. Also, disabling Nautilus should give a warning that some functionality will be disabled.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:28 UTC (Wed) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > I'd actually say it's more akin to turning on your TV so you can change the time on your VCR. That's not the primary use of either piece of equipment, but it reuses the existing relationship among the pieces to great effect. It's also a huge waste of power and time for what should be a trivial job and one for which UI elements already exist; the only people who benefit from it are the people who are doing the Wrong Thing in the first place (in that case, leaving their TV on all the time). And it's not an optional job (at least not anywhere that has DST or power outages). Moreover, if I saw that, I'd assume the rest of the UI made me work proportionally harder, and I'd go and buy something else. ...So yeah, actually not a bad analogy.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 21:20 UTC (Wed) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] Hmmm... I don't leave my TV on all the time, and yet, I benefit from OSD to program my time on my VCR. I only need to do it twice a year and it only takes a minute or two. Using menus on a screen that are readable and intuitive compared to the tiny buttons and limited feedback pre-OSD VCRs gave me years ago is a UI benefit. You could compare this to right clicking the background vs. having to edit an .xsession file and adding an xsetroot command in the right place pointing to a graphics file of the right format.
Do they actually not like their users? Posted Apr 26, 2008 3:46 UTC (Sat) by hamish (subscriber, #6282) [Link] Heh, anticipating this problem, the manufacturers of my VCR built a 5cm QVGA LCD screen into it - So I get the full UI without turning on my TV
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:29 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] It's an optional job if you bought a modern VCR (not that those really exist any more since they're obsolete) and live in a country with decent TV. The VCR will normally auto-tune during setup, thus finding channels with data services, the data services nearly always carry a clock. It can watch the suspect clock for a while, and if it does seem to be a clock, set the time. e.g. 12:01:01 progressing to 12:01:02 suggests a clock, whereas earl; 806 progressing to n36 - ok does not :) And yes, I've definitely owned VCRs able to do this, and yes, they used an on-screen display for their setup thus obliging you, the VCR owner to also have and use a television. No complaints here. I've also used a VCR (my parents) with a 14 day 20 item, semi-repeating programmable timer and no on-screen display and let me just say, you are stone cold crazy if you think that's better. I'd rather buy a new VCR for someone than help them use one of those horrible LCD panel remote controls to try to set up or program the VCR.
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 7:46 UTC (Thu) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] And yes, I've definitely owned VCRs able to do this, and yes, they used an on-screen display for their setup thus obliging you, the VCR owner to also have and use a television. No complaints here. I've also used a VCR (my parents) with a 14 day 20 item, semi-repeating programmable timer and no on-screen display and let me just say, you are stone cold crazy if you think that's better. I'd rather buy a new VCR for someone than help them use one of those horrible LCD panel remote controls to try to set up or program the VCR. That's exactly where I'm coming from. :-) And sure, VCRs are by and large obsolete these days, but they're useful as a ready example since nearly everyone's experienced them by now and they're meant to be used by average consumers, not trained experts. And everyone I think knows a family member or relative with "blinking 12:00" syndrome, especially with those older, arcane VCRs. My stepmom's parents used to tape over the clock with black electrical tape back in the 80s, indicating the depth of failure the old, clunky interfaces exhibited.
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 19:25 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I did own such a VCR, and yes, it blinked 12:00 most of the time. I just had no use for the clock in it (until I programmed it to record at a time I had to be away).
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 8:05 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > I've also used a VCR (my parents) with a 14 day 20 item, semi-repeating programmable timer and no on-screen display and let me just say, you are stone cold crazy if you think that's better. Way to move the goalposts. I was talking about a VCR that required you to *set the clock* via a TV. I wasn't talking about a VCR that only permitted you to program it in-depth from the front panel (although arguably "start recording in 2 hours, stop an hour after that" should be as easy to do as setting the time). On the other hand, perhaps you've provided us with a perfect illustration of the binary thought patterns which lead to monstrosities like that originally complained about.
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 12:18 UTC (Thu) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] I really don't have a problem setting the time using the TV. I'd reckon the vast majority of VCRs still in service are connected to TVs, and that's my point. VCR manufacturers can safely assume that a TV will be connected to the VCR, and so it can serve as a display when necessary. Ignoring the 14-day timer aspect, it's still easier to set the time with OSD than it is with tiny buttons and minimal feedback on the VCR itself.
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 20:44 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > I'd reckon the vast majority of VCRs still in service are connected to TVs ...and are those TVs always turned on and ready to go?
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 20:51 UTC (Thu) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] Why does it matter? Is my monitor always turned on with my mouse hovering over the wallpaper with my finger on the mouse just waiting to right click?
VCR setup Posted Apr 24, 2008 21:19 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > Why does it matter? Oxygen thief. :P
I forgot one part - the stove would have to be powered on Posted Apr 23, 2008 21:28 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] So, to draw an analogy, that's like having to go to the stove in the kitchen to change the channel on the television in the living room. Furthermore, with respect to our editor's experience, the stove would have to be powered on to change the TV channel. Okay, I'll lay off now. But, I would like to make a general observation about GNOME v. KDE: A friend and fellow grad student with whom I share an office has Ubuntu 7.10 installed on his ThinkPad T61. I'm running Slackware 12 and KDE on a second-hand Dell Latitude C610. His experience using computers prior to Linux was entirely on Macs, whereas my pre-Linux desktop PC experience was all Windows. He prefers GNOME, I prefer KDE. Again, this is merely an observation. Not that I couldn't be persuaded to learn/use GNOME sometime. But before that happens, I'd certainly appreciate knowing that tasks such as changing the desktop wallpaper aren't obfuscated to oblivion.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 2:54 UTC (Thu) by elama (subscriber, #262) [Link] Well, using fedora (8 or 9 doesn't matter) this works just fine. Just use System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance / Background change the background setting, logoff and login again. No problem.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:22 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Changing the cursor blink behaviour is a lot easier than the article makes out. I was able to turn off cursor blink desktop wide by going to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, then unchecking the "Cursor blinks in text fields" checkbox. I can see how this could be confusing if the user expected it to be a per-app setting, but other than the old gnome-terminal behaviour there isn't much reason to expect it to be per-app.
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 2:54 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] It's good that there's a central preference, but why on earth is this under Keyboard? Surely it should be under Appearance, Behaviour or similar ...
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:57 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Probably because it is related to handling of keyboard input? It also happens to be where Windows and MacOS X put it, and there doesn't seem to be many compelling reasons to be different (save that for places where it matters).
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 26, 2008 7:38 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Perhaps because on Windows and Mac it is off by default, and nobody in their right minds sees a sensible reason to switch it on, so nobody ever tries to find it?
Do the actually not like their users? Posted Apr 24, 2008 0:54 UTC (Thu) by elama (subscriber, #262) [Link] The whole gnome/background discussion reminds me of the "color of the bike shed" phenomenon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed). And desktop environments tend to be full of bike sheds... It's not that gnome-developers don't like their users. It's just not that easy to make everybody happy.
The problem of configurability Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:41 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] The GNOME developers made the decision a long time ago to reduce the number of options in their GUI config panels. To a new user having everything exposed makes things very complex, not to mention the problems caused if you don't think carefully about the interaction between those knobs. Personally I'm sanguine about the loss as long as the power users can still access stuff through GConf (which despite my earlier objections to it's Windows like registry approach I've learnt to love). But even then those options do come at a cost from a code maintenance point of view. There is nothing to stop people who want a GUI from developing a PowerGUI like app to tweak these knobs for people that have yet to learn the command line. But to be honest if you want to be a power user I think learning the command line is required reading.
The problem of configurability Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:58 UTC (Thu) by elama (subscriber, #262) [Link] Yes. I agree the gconf approach makes sense. I do have my own set of gnome-settings I care of and so I do have a short script that sets those via gconftool-2. Very fast, very predictable. Only drawback is, that there is no easy option that I'm aware of to check whether a key is valid/used. So if gnome changes certain keys in newer versions you still have to search for correct replacement.
The problem of configurability Posted Apr 24, 2008 6:22 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] It should be possible, gconftool -R will dump possible keys. A mixture of perl and grep and you should be able to test if your key still exists: 13:21 ajb@pitcairn/x86_64 [~] >gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/interface | grep "cursor_blink =" cursor_blink = true 13:21 ajb@pitcairn/x86_64 [~] >echo $? 0 13:21 ajb@pitcairn/x86_64 [~] >gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/interface | grep "removed_key =" 13:21 ajb@pitcairn/x86_64 [~] >echo $? 1
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:52 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link] You really can't complain about the background feature. You did some weird and very non-normal customization that only a teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy fraction of people who use GNOME are going to do. If it breaks, oh damn well. I also don't see why you think it makes no sense for Nautilus to handle backgrounds, given that on 99.9999% of GNOME desktops, Nautilus is running and draws over the root window. Putting the background support code anywhere else is just silly. This is why reviews of software from elitist UNIX nerds are so pointless. They fail to grasp the needs of regular people and they spend half the review complaining about stuff that nobody with a life (see below) cares about. The suspend/resume complaint is pretty critical. Unless the fix involved running the updater and letting fixed packages correct the system, having to change files or whatnot is entirely not a real solution for real people who didn't spend the last 5+ years wasting time learning Linux internals that they could have spent camping, reading, doing artistic projects, getting laid, hanging out with friends, raising a family, etc. The other two complaints in this article just prove that the editor is a nerd and anyone reading who cares about those issues are nerds.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:18 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] The flashing cursor thing is one of those issues like Caps Lock where a surprisingly large number of not particularly geeky people care. So you need to have a solution. But these people recognise that they're asking for something a bit special, and will be happy to be told how to fix it with Gconf either from a command line (as the Grumpy Editor chose) or using the supplied GUI configuration editor. Microsoft has to support plenty of registry entries for these people too. Tab completion in the CMD.EXE ? For every person who can't live without it there are a thousand who've never run CMD.EXE in their lives. Want a proportional font in your fixed-pitch text editor? Windows'll do it if you know the magic incantation. Again, probably a hundred people in the world want that, but since two of them worked on the text editor, there it is. Now the Nautilus disabling antics I agree are pushing it. If you want to rip out a core piece of the system you have to expect a certain amount of dangling pipework to get left behind.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:24 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] A flashing cursor definitely should not be the default on laptops. It burns power and decreases battery life.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:27 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] It times out. That's part of the reason why this feature was centralised, which in turn lead to our Grumpy Editor being slightly more Grumpy than usual. Next to the setting to disable it altogether is one which adjusts the length of time before it stops flashing when idle.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:50 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] The cursor_blink_time setting controls the speed of the blinking -- it doesn't cause the blinking to stop after a time out.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 2:47 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] You're right. I could have sworn there was a timeout as well as time there, but no, it looks like it's only in the widget toolkit (If anyone does want this, a Google search will find you an explanation of how to set the timeout for all GTK+ applications, at least if your libraries are new enough)
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 30, 2008 12:30 UTC (Wed) by pimlottc (subscriber, #44833) [Link] Are you serious? The possible power draw of painting a cursor has to be so vanishingly small as to be unmeasurable.
Power cost of painting a cursor Posted Apr 30, 2008 12:32 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] The power draw of things like cursor painting goes up significantly when it must wake the processor. The key to saving power is long sleep times; anything which wakes the processor unnecessarily works against that.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:25 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (subscriber, #46433) [Link] What a stupid thing to say. That doesn't prove anything. It's possible, you know, to do all of the above mentioned. No problem. I agree with the background problem, that's no normal use case; but the things corbet looked at in the article is things we who just want to use the computer also need. Like lower power consumption, suspend/resume as you said and not destroying old documents. Anyway, it's fun to read and that's as far as I know much of the point in Grumpy Editor series. :-)
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 16:05 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] What a stupid thing to say.Second. Here I am writing software when I could have spent my life camping. I wonder it it's too late to start over...
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 12:11 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] I think there is just reason to complain. Yes, this is not a common scenario. However, the previous behaviour was for it to work, and the new behaviour is for it not to. Perhaps you should not be able to specify the background image in the gnome settings if nautilus is not running, with a suitably informative message if you try.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 23, 2008 12:21 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] Everyone who cares about performance should disable Nautilus on desktop. Nautilus on my system consumes between 20 and 80 MB of RAM between itself and its cached X pixmaps (this is a general Gnome problem on 64-bit compiles: its libraries are overly pointer-happy: learn to use arrays and linked array blocks people!). This 80 MB is useless most of the time. Who uses it on the desktop? Most of the time you can't because there are applications in the way. The Places menu or an active Nautilus window in the Taskbar is then the only easy way to get to files. Watch someone actually using their computer. They may use a desktop icon two or three times in an entire *day*. The performance issues are many. When Nautilus is running the desktop and your system is running low on memory the system swaps it out because it is rarely active. Then, when you switch virtual windows or close or minimize your application, Nautilus and its inactive X memory has to swap back in causing awful UI stutters as X gets suspended during paging. It sets file activity monitors on all directories it is open on. Whenever a file changes, Nautilus wakes up and runs, wasting CPU and again forcing the kernel to pull it in from swap. When using a non-accelerated X driver and moving items across the desktop, Nautilus again screws up. The X root background has special handling from the old days when all systems were slow. Nautilus is a regular window and does not. So, for every motion of dragging a window across Nautilus, X wakes up Nautilus to redraw the background window. Using a file manager to draw the entire background, *just to have two stupid desktop icons no one uses* is a ridiculous idea. Why oh why didn't the programmers just create a small invisible window around each of the desktop icons? So, in my opinion, not using Nautilus for desktop background should be the default not the exception!
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:55 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] What on earth are you running GNOME on? I haven't seen any of these issues on my ancient desktop PC, an Athlon XP 2500+ from donkeys years ago with a mere 1 GB of RAM.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:40 UTC (Wed) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] So much for the whole "bring your ancient hardware back to life with Linux" argument. Oh well... guess it's time to throw out my perfectly function P2/333 then - oh hang on, I can't because I live in Europe; it costs less to keep it running than it would to dispose of it.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 0:00 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] No, so much for "Run new shiny Linux Desktop on old junk". Noone prevents you from installing a light-weight desktop, it's what they are there for. (I have old junk too, but I install things that are suitable for old junk)
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 8:25 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] What increased functionality am I getting for the shiny? I keep asking that question, and the "bugger all" I keep answering is why I don't regard said P2 as junk yet - it runs fluxbox just fine, and the only reason it isn't my usual desktop is the great big inefficient heap of shit that is firefox (which even on larger, faster machines behaves as though it's the only program I'd ever need in memory - it's a *web browser*, for crying out loud! a desktop accessory!) and the even bigger one that is openoffice. Trust me, if there were usable lightweight alternatives to those I'd be using them; unfortunately, more and more programs that would be (or worse, used to be) quite useful to me if they only depended on gtk or qt cleave ever closer to GNOME or KDE (abiword is a good example). Once upon a time, one of the more compelling arguments for using Linux was that it allowed you to step off the upgrade treadmill and use the kit you had for longer. Increasingly I'm getting the sense that this is no longer feasible. You might not care about that, but those who cannot look after their own minorities have no business pleading for minority recognition themselves.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 10:05 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] Fluxbox is definately a fine WM, by all means use it, if you don't think you get anything out of running a heavier WM/desktop. Abiword is probably the most lightweight word processor there is... Heck, it doesn't even require X, if you don't need a UI (Which admittedly, most people do for wordprocessing). I don't know if your distribution chose to build it against GNOME libraries, which is an option, but that is hardly neither Abiword nor GNOME's fault. In Ubuntu (and probably Debian), you can choose a GTK or GNOME-bound version. There is plenty of browser alternatives. If you don't find them usable enough, then maybe that could be what you are getting for the shiny? While I fully respect the need to running programs on older computers, there's no reason to keep everyone on the minimum resources, especially when there IS lightweight alternatives. That those alternatives doesn't suit you, has nothing to do with not looking after minorities.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 21:13 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > While I fully respect the need to running programs on older computers, there's no reason to keep everyone on the minimum resources Yes there is. If you optimise for low resource usage, *everyone* benefits. If you optimise for current hardware, you just screwed everyone who can't upgrade yet. > There is plenty of browser alternatives ...which are...? Just the actively-developed FOSS ones, please - let's at least try to maintain a level playing field. But anyway, I just experimented; I went and grabbed an old copy of Mozilla 1.5 (you know, the browser that Firefox replaced because it was "too heavyweight") - and it runs like a dream on my current hardware. I'm using it right now. Moreover, it doesn't unduly compromise my web experience... *yet*; I'm at the mercy of a million script kiddies deciding that "nobody uses sub-GHz computers / single-threaded Javascript engines / machines without Flash" any more, and not bothering to ensure that they don't lock out anyone whose hardware doesn't match their own in specification. (I used to use links -g from the framebuffer, until too many sites decided that Javascript is non-negotiable, and "a sea of DIVs" could be used as a description of both the content and its authors, and I got a couple of computers with no good framebuffer support.) Once FF3 is my only choice, I'm screwed. And complacency like yours is responsible for that, unless you're going to buy me a brand new computer every 3 years. (Nah, didn't think so.) > Abiword is probably the most lightweight word processor there is... Actually, the combination of vi, troff and gv probably fulfils that description. Notable is the absence of bloat with each new release of that software - vim isn't putting on the pounds in anywhere near the same way that firefox, soffice, KDE or GNOME are. Hell, the whole set is probably fast enough that you can preview your changes in more or less realtime now - which is as it should be; more capacitous hardware should let you do more, not get soaked up by an infrastructure that expands even more rapidly, and feature addition should not cause supra-exponential resource usage growth. As for Abiword, well... it's lightweight compared with OpenOffice, but overall? Er, no - and last time I tried to compile it without GNOME support, it insisted in having a goodly chunk of GNOME architecture around anyway (and my patience got exhausted before I retrieved all of it). It's also sufficiently unpredictable that I can't trust it not to mangle my work (I'm glad I'm not at university any more). Rather than turning on the condescension, perhaps you might consider that I've been at this long enough to look for solutions, and not find them where I might have done a few years ago, and *that*'s why I'm disgusted? That from my perspective, the new world order with which you seem to be so infatuated is actually a *regression*?
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 25, 2008 2:10 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] You keep mentioning alternatives that are more lightweight yourself, but you seem to refuse to use them. ...which are...? Just the actively-developed FOSS ones, please - let's at least try to maintain a level playing field. If it's so important for you to use the latest and greatest with the oldest and puniest, you are going to have to help making the monsters more light. You could also i.e. help add CSS and JavaScript support to Dillo. But don't expect people like me to stop using the extra power of recent hardware to add features we like, we are not here to help your agendas, but to help ourselves and our agendas.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 25, 2008 9:31 UTC (Fri) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > You keep mentioning alternatives that are more lightweight yourself, but you seem to refuse to use them. ...except that I *do* use them, day in day out, and find myself screwed as a result. Since you weren't even able to grasp that point, I don't think there is any point in continuing this conversation. You just go right along coding for the top 1% of computers and hope that Moore will solve all your problems. But he won't - you *are* the problem.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 25, 2008 18:51 UTC (Fri) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link] > If it's so important for you to use the latest and greatest with the oldest and puniest, you are going to have to help making the monsters more light. The monsters I can't even *compile*?
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 4:12 UTC (Thu) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link] Some of us (including our editor) measure time in human years, and in human years, quite a reasonable computer comes with just a few hundred megabytes of ram and processors considerably slower than yours. And amazingly enough, these computers that worked a few years ago, actually still work. And if we avoid running windows or gnome, they continue to work well. Actually, to be honest, my wife runs gnome on her X22 (PIII 800MHz) which is only a little faster than my computer. But she's pretty patient, and her computer runs pretty slowly. I always just blamed it on firefox, but if disabling nautilus were to speed things up, that would be worth trying.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 11:10 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] The hardware is an 2.2 GHz Athlon64 laptop with 1 GB RAM. Hardly ancient, although it is 3.5 years old now. High memory pressure is caused by running Open Office, Evolution (on really big IMAP folders), Beagle and many web browser tabs. It isn't hard at all to get things swapping and laptop disk is the worst ever for swapping. CPU speed isn't 2.2GHz most of the time. Most of the time it's idling at 800 MHz and it takes a small amount of time to clock up when there's demand. X window speed would actually be good -- if I were running the Nvidia binary drivers. Instead I'm running the "nv" open source driver which is nearly an unaccelerated frame buffer.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 23, 2008 18:51 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] > Why oh why didn't the programmers just create a small invisible window around each of the desktop icons? Because with this approach, the code required to let the icons to be dragged around and positioned becomes much more insane. That's X for you. Like most stuff on X, the current approach definitely isn't perfect, but it is the result of a decade+ of people trying every approach they could think of...
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 24, 2008 21:25 UTC (Thu) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] Expose events will be generated for any window. I sure as hell don't see the desktop most of the time, so most of the time, it gets no Expose events. The "special handling" you're talking about must be the backing store, which, AFAIK, causes more problems than it's worth. If you want that behavior, just switch to a compositing window manager. Also, let's suppose you're right about memory. So what if Nautilus and its X pixmaps use a combined 80MB? You make it sound like the entire thing is paged in whenever the program is woken up. That's not correct: instead, only the relatively few pages touched by the event-handling code are paged in. And the little bit of code that wakes up, notes a file alteration, and continues is simply not that big. The dozen or so pages it takes up will be kept resident, as they're referenced frequently, and the rest of the program will go into cold storage. That's how it's supposed to work.
Nautilus on Desktop is a Bad Idea Posted Apr 25, 2008 16:27 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] > Expose events will be generated for any window. Yes. Except for the root window, which gets the "special handling" I was talking about. The X server handles it directly. It isn't quite the same as backing store, and no other window gets this. > If you want that behavior, just switch to a compositing window manager. Use a compositing window manager with a video driver without either XRender or OpenGL acceleration? I'd be lucky to get one desktop update every 3 seconds once "modern" programs start trying to use compositing. > only the relatively few pages touched by the event-handling code are paged in. And the little bit of code that wakes up, notes a file alteration, and continues is simply not that big. Except that isn't exactly what happens. Say that a program is writing to a file with periodic pauses: perhaps a slow network download and Nautilus is open on my Downloads directory with hundreds of files in it. There's enough time between file notifications that the code swaps out again. It doesn't take much, just a few seconds of inactivity. Then the event comes in and it isn't just a few bits of code. Nautilus actually rescans the file header and compares it with the mime type database to see if the type has changed so it can update the icon and a lot more. The data structure that backs a Nautilus file display is not a small little array that shares a few 4KB memory pages; its actually all over the map, held together with pointers. The entire swap-in/idle/swap-out dance can cause hundreds of KB/s of random I/O swap activity. Now, I don't actually mind all this for a Nautilus window I've left open. Live file updates are pretty cool. But Nautilus on the desktop and it doing all this work for something I never look it is a bad idea which is why I turn it off.
Nautilus on Desktop is not a Bad Idea Posted Apr 27, 2008 5:17 UTC (Sun) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] Huh. Right now, I'm running pretty much stock hardy on my HP pavilion N5425. Athlon 900Mhz, 256MB of ram. Nautilus is using 12.6MB of ram. Firefox3b5 is using 37.5MB of ram. http://www.sllabs.com/kamilion/hardy.png The whole system is quite quick and responsive, and using the desktop is a joy for me. I run several servers which I routinely manage with ssh/sftp and I enjoy being able to mount CIFS and sftp and interact with them using nautilus. Currently, my system has four sftp mounts and two CIFS mounts active. 90% of the time, my CPU runs at 500Mhz thanks to hardy's nice support of powernowd and cpu-freq. I used to use Linux From Scratch and fluxbox, but I got sick of compiling everything by hand, so I switched over to gentoo. (Don't let that get you into thinking I was one of those ricers that throw every CFLAGS option they can at it, I ran with a modest -Os -pipe, and tuned my useflags carefully, not everything needs to be compiled with mysql and postgresql support!) Eventually, I got sick of waiting for gentoo to build new packages and switched over to gutsy last october. I was quite impressed with it's ease of use and soon discovered hardy a week later, long before the alphas even hit. Now I'm giving hardy CDRs away faster than I can burn them to my friends who are impressed with all of my PCs because they Just Work (TM). I've even stooped as low as giving hardy CDRs out in my local bar, where they've been a big hit! (If you're ever in the area, Drop by Bert's Alibi, 1313 El Camino Real, Mountain View CA, and tell 'em the hacker kid in the Tahoe hoodie sent you for a draft Fat Tire! (Previously known as Ugly's Bar) Funnily enough, I've met a lot of ex and current HP employees there that still remember HP-UX on the HP9000s...) Hardy works very well on all of my older boxes, from a P2-450 with 192MB of ram to my nForce2/XP2100+/2GB desktop. Every box I've tried it on, it's just worked. Personally, I think it's a little harsh to denounce the heron when you've disabled Nautilus just because you don't 'need' a file manager. Give it a shot for a couple weeks, try out mounting various network drives, marvel at it's PDF, image, and video thumbnailing, play with some of the panel applets (My favorites are the CPU frequency monitor and the system monitor), enjoy getting the weather and outdoor temperature with the clock, give the OSX-like list view a go, download an ISO on your desktop, right click it and burn it to disc in three clicks... You might just get hooked. Believe me, I'm just as much of a commandline cowboy as the rest of you, I came from Slackware 1.5.0 back in '95. I've actually been a lot faster, more efficient, and impressed with the modern GNOME Gui. You try copying 18 PDF files with vastly different names, Capitalization and spaces, from a directory of 40 files from a command line, and tell me how long you spend typing out a huge glob of text just to copy a couple files I can Ctrl-click on in less then 5 seconds with a mousewheel spin and a drag. Hardy really does make my computer a pleasure to use again. I'm thankful for that, after having to admin Windows from NT3.51 to the currently excruciatingly painful to use vista at work. Oh, and a simple Alt-F2 to bring up the Run dialog and "gconf-editor" will expose all those little hidden options people seem to be dying without, with nice self-documenting short AND long descriptions of almost every option. Just like netinfo on OSX or the Windows registry editor, only without the confusing keynames and lack of documentation! -- Kamilion "Never feel stupid for asking questions, feel stupid for ignoring answers."
Elitist Unix nerds Posted Apr 23, 2008 16:43 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I found this comment a bit...disrepectful, so I didn't answer it for a while. I'll content myself with this:
This is why reviews of software from elitist UNIX nerds are so pointless. They fail to grasp the needs of regular people and they spend half the review complaining about stuff that nobody with a life (see below) cares about. You talk about "the needs of regular people" here, but nowhere else. Instead we got a rant on the technical reasons why one should be expected to keep a file manager around to set their display background. I don't see why "regular people" should care about whether it's more convenient for developers to have nautilus implement that particular preference. I'm sorry I don't have the time to argue with you about the quality of my life; I need to go practice violin with my daughter now.
Elitist Unix nerds Posted Apr 27, 2008 11:50 UTC (Sun) by kevinbsmith (subscriber, #4778) [Link] I admire and greatly appreciate your measured and respectful response to a highly inflammatory criticism of the original article. You have once again enhanced your reputation and that of lwn. The flameful poster did have some valid points buried within the muck. One is that there are different kinds of users. It is frustrating to me to read so many "Gnome is worthless because it doesn't support feature X that I started using in 1985" posts. Clearly Gnome is not targeting long-time Unix devotees, and has not done so for years, and is very open about it. It's not surprising to me that our grumpy editor would have a nerdy orientation, nor that most lwn readers do as well. Perhaps it would be nice when reviewing a consumer-friendly product like Ubuntu or Gnome to make it more clear that this is a nerd-oriented review. Although I am a very technical nerd, I learned long ago to accept as many system defaults as possible, to avoid wasting time re-configuring, and to avoid shock when I work on other people's systems. As a result, most of Gnome's automatic behaviors are fine with me. When they change something, I assume there was probably a good reason, and try my best to learn to love the new way. Occasionally I find one that seems unbearable (like years ago when evolution used to scroll by half-screens for the mouse wheel), but those are rare. As for the nautilus issue, it seems clear to me that the bug(s) were in not making it clear what would stop working if/when you removed nautilus. Informed consent, as it were.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 16:41 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] It makes no sense for Nautilus to handle the background because I don't want my background to get changed when I start up a file manager. For your 99.9999% to be real, the Grumpy Editor and I would have to be the only two people out of two million GNOME users to dislike this feature. A review that helps its audience isn't pointless. Why it's so outrageous that "elitist" Unix nerds (note the proper capitalization there) should get to talk about what they like and dislike about a program and possibly have needs and desires that aren't shared by the average user I fail to understand. Just because a SUV fits "regular people" doesn't mean that the desires of those who drive subcompacts and sports cars, semis and buses should be ignored.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 23:26 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] > This is why reviews of software from elitist UNIX nerds are so pointless. They fail to grasp the needs of regular people Yep. On the related news, do you know why reviews of software from regular people are so pointless as well? Ironically, they fail to grasp the needs of elitist UNIX nerds. Now skim through the comments and do the math. I see zero regular people and one regular troll. I'd suggest letting regular people write to regular people alike, and nerds for nerds, and for that one aforementioned person to take a hike :)
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted May 6, 2008 16:07 UTC (Tue) by mauvaisours (subscriber, #6130) [Link] Mhhhh.... are you so sure of that ? How many developpers turn off the file manager, because, well, you just have a terminal window somewhere. I know I do. My (still 7.10)desktop at work has no nautilus running, and I'm wondering if I am going to switch to 8.04.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:11 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] The really disappointing thing about this release to me is the continued reliance on NetworkManager. That thing is an absolute nightmare. It's funny how years ago Linux networking was so easy and things like printing were confusing and broken. Now, printing is generally easy and simple and, thanks to the ubiquitousness of NetworkManager, networking is a horror. I would have thought that a new LTS release would either have (a) fixed NM finally and for good, or else (b) scrapped it or at least made it an optional addition for laptops. Alas, no such luck. I'm sure if you have a computer that you tote around between wireless access points, something like NetworkManager is useful enough to justify its quirks. But for us folks who have systems that just sit there and talk to the same network (wired or wireless) all the time, there's no justification for all the pain it causes: it's simply a hugely complicated, marginally functioning blob of junk replacing what used to be a very simple, easy, and robust networking implementation. Be careful, or I'll tell you how I really feel about it!
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:25 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Yes, NetworkManager is designed primarily for laptops, not for computers that are permanently attached to one specific network environment.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:31 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] You'll simply have to go into more detail than that. What is so bad about NetworkManager? I use it on my desktops and laptops and think it's really great.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:53 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] I'm not sure if Ubuntu follows Debian in this regard, but one of the most frustrating aspects of the way it interacts with the packaging system for me is it insists on deactivating the network when it is closed. Quite often I've had networkmanager stop the network whilst I was doing a remote upgrade, and lock me out of the machine entirely. NM also seems to be unable to cope with a station with a given BSSID changing encryption type.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 12:22 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] Probably you don't use it in an enterprise setting, and/or you've never tried to take it out of roaming mode. Here are a few examples: my environment is a traditional UNIX Enterprise setup where password, group, and automount data is transferred via NIS. When NM is being used, the network is not up when the next service is being initialized. Instead, you're supposed to wait for a dbus message. So, the system starts up, NM comes up and starts broadcasting for a DHCP service or whatever. Meanwhile, NIS comes up, but there's no network. Now, someone has hacked NIS (which is a service invented by Sun back in the 1980's!!) to listen for dbus messages, so it sits there waiting for NM to get a network and the system continues to start services. So, next, autofs starts up and tries to read the automount maps from NIS. But, NIS is not started, so no maps are available. So, I have nothing automountable. I have to wait until AFTER my system comes up, then go in and restart autofs by hand so that it will read my maps properly from the now-running network. Stupid. But wait, you say! This isn't NM's fault! autofs should be enhanced to grok dbus messages! Bullhooey. NIS and autofs and other services like that have been around for 20 years, some of them. They are used across a huge variety of UNIX systems, not just Linux. Saying that all these services have to be modified to interact with the Linux-specific dbus just so they can communicate with NM is wrong. It's just the wrong design. I can't believe someone enhanced ypbind for this, and I certainly can't support continuing to modify more services in this way. Whatever the right solution IS, it is assuredly NOT to continue to graft on specialized "one-off" features like this to standard, portable services. Maybe the right answer is for NM to provide a generic dbus "listener" program that can be invoked as a wrapper around legacy services like nis and autofs, and run standard sysv service operations like "/etc/init.d/nis start" or whatever when the proper dbus messages are received. So, that's the main thing. The other thing is that NM likes to bring down the network. On one of the Fedora boxes I was using it would bring down the network every time I logged out! So annoying. That may be the right thing to do on a laptop where, when you log out, you may want your wireless interface to go down so others can't use it, but it makes absolutely zero sense for a wired desktop. This doesn't happen on Ubuntu so maybe that was a Fedora "feature". The last example may not be NM: I'm not really clear exactly where the Gnome tools stop and NM proper begins. However, on Ubuntu Hardy I go to my network management utility and I turn off roaming mode, and set my interface to use DHCP (I did this in the hopes of solving the above problem: I actually wanted NetworkManager to go away and to get back to the traditional model). Well, I look at /etc/network/interfaces and sure enough, I see the right thing there. But oh no! Now I can't use sudo anymore! I have no root access! What happened? Well, turned out that my /etc/hosts file was mucked up and I no longer had an entry for my local host, and sudo requires that before it will let you log in. Since there's no root password on an Ubuntu system, I had to boot off a rescue CD, mount the root partition, and fix the /etc/hosts file by hand. Nice. NM may be great if you have networks that change, but it's nothing but headaches for (probably still the majority of) people who just want to use the same network from bootup to shutdown.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:28 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] It sounds like your complaint boils down to "autofs should start after NIS, which in turn should start after the network is up", and "the NetworkManager startup script completes before the network is up". Having NIS, autofs, etc talk DBus and sit around doing nothing until the network is up is one option. Another option is to trigger the start of these services when the network comes up rather than when the system boots. Upstart offers some of the infrastructure that could be used to implement this kind of policy -- what needs to be done now is to fix up the startup scripts.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 9:03 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] Actually, that is just a specific example of a general principle: NM is not ready for LTS, or at least it should not be enabled for all LTS users. Whether that's because of problems in NM itself (which there do appear to be, such as the /etc/hosts mangling) or because Ubuntu (and Fedora, from comments here and other places) just haven't managed to integrate it properly, is almost beside the point. If NM is going to REQUIRE changes to fundamental infrastructure that has existed for decades before it will allow your network to operate correctly, then that infrastructure needs to be changed and working BEFORE NM is deployed, especially in an LTS release. My second point is that the current apparent design solution for deploying NM (modify the code of all network-related services to grok NM dbus messages) is fundamentally WRONG. It's not portable, it's not scalable, it's time-intensive, it's duplicating work, it's error prone, and it's not The UNIX Way. Whether that's how NM recommends it should work, I don't know: maybe it's not NM but rather the distros trying to integrate NM that are making these decisions. I already suggested one way that NM could mitigate this, by providing a wrapper utility that can manage dbus messages and translate them into "traditional" network service operations. You suggest another way, which is to enhance the network services to use Upstart which, presumably, is already integrated into dbus, rather than, or in addition to, the traditional sysv init scripts. That would be fine with me as well. Basically, NM may be great for people with complicated network requirements but it just breaks things for people with simple network requirements, with no added benefit. This is unacceptable, especially for an LTS release. Whether that's NM's fault, Ubuntu's fault, or a combination I'm not sure.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 29, 2008 5:52 UTC (Tue) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link] There's more to it than that - if the network connection is at all bouncy (on laptops it's relatively likely to be so) you end up needing to kick services that depend on it whenever there is a network status change.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:39 UTC (Thu) by deleteme (subscriber, #49633) [Link] The problem with NetworkManager removing localhost from /etc/hosts is quite unforgivable. It's never happened me to this date, and I've done this alot. So I hope I wont have this problem with 8.04..
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 9:17 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] It doesn't remove localhost; it removes your local host name (or maybe it mangles it, I can't remember exactly). So if you name your system "myubuntu", that name is no longer correctly present in /etc/hosts which means sudo does not allow you to log in. FYI, here's the Launchpad bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager... Note that I had the same failure on my system by disabling "roaming mode" in my network config applet and setting my system to use DHCP. This is all through the GUI, using "supported" methods of configuring the system. There have been reports that just upgrading to the new release caused this problem, although I did this on my system at home last night and it worked (I didn't try to reset the network config though). There is also a bug reported against sudo for this: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sudo/+bug/... Contrary to the strident assertions of folks like asmoore82, I do believe this is a bug, or at the very least an important enhancement. Or, if not, maybe it's proof that sudo is not the right solution for Ubuntu. I actually really like this model of no root password / use sudo for everything that Ubuntu uses... but there should NEVER be a situation where a simple thing like messing up your /etc/hosts file causes you to no longer be able to log in with administrator privileges and FIX a problem like messing up your /etc/hosts file. A typo in a file like that should NEVER require resorting to the rescue disk, mounting a partition by hand, and editing the file to fix the problem.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 10:49 UTC (Thu) by Hawke (subscriber, #6978) [Link] It also seems related to bug #8980, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netcfg/+bug/8980
I am appalled. Posted Apr 24, 2008 16:49 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] Never had any of the forementioned problems. Sure, you could have put "invoke-rc.d autofs restart" in a file inside your /etc/network/if-up.d/ and voila, but apparently it's too arcane. Maybe I'm getting old. I have three laptops, one dekstop and an AppleTV all running kde-network-manager (some stuck at home network, some roaming wildly) and it's pretty much plug-and-play for me.
I am appalled. Posted Apr 24, 2008 17:35 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] As I said, it's enterprise environments where it fails. Sure, simple home users with a cable or DSL modem serving DHCP, or connecting to your local Starbucks wifi or whatever, have no problems: everyone uses that model and of course it works properly. It's when you start needing lots of OTHER network services, like NIS, autofs, etc. etc. that we hit the "there be dragons" areas where Ubuntu has not done the due diligence to make sure their super-cool new features don't break traditional, long-standing, it-just-works facilities. BTW, adding a script to if-up.d won't work: the problem is not that autofs starts before the network interface comes up: autofs actually doesn't need the network interface to be up IIRC. The problem is that autofs starts before NIS binds to its server, so when autofs starts and asks NIS for its maps, NIS doesn't give it any maps, so autofs doesn't set up any automounts. What needs to happen is autofs cannot start until AFTER NIS has finished binding to its server. I don't know of any way to do that in the current Ubuntu LTS release, short of creating some script that runs in the background and queries NIS to see when it has maps available, then (re-)starts autofs when it is.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 29, 2008 5:50 UTC (Tue) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link] FWIW the "someone" who hacked this into NIS was that SuSE developer who is the Linux NIS upstream. It actually works pretty well when Network Manager reports accurate information but unfortunately Network Manager seems to have lots of trouble with that on some systems.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:43 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] At least in Gentoo, NetworkMangager is optional. So you can, for example, enable it for laptops but disable it for workstations.
NetworkManager Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:44 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] For me NetworkManager pays its way just by properly managing the plug-unplug scenarios between two wired networks. I rarely used wireless networks any more in the city (since they're hopelessly unreliable due to their sheer numbers, as I had predicted years ago when 802.11 was brand new and people were trying to get regulatory clearance for it, I can "see" 15 of them from here, and this isn't particularly crowded) It isn't as robust as it should be, it is more complicated than it should be, and some aspects of it seem to be calculated to annoy BUT the old "so easy" Linux networking setup was wrong in lots of nasty ways. For example, when a machine notices that it has been disconnected from the network physically, it's fair enough if it doesn't want to remove the IP address it had, in order to avoid needlessly disrupting sessions that might survive if the link is reconnected soon. However Linux (without NetworkManager) doesn't stop at that. It will happily carry over an address assignment from one network and use it on another, causing a duplicate address incident (since nearly everyone seems to use NAT, subject of another rant altogether). Does Linux handle duplicate addresses in a way that users will know about? Nope, it quietly logs them as if they were a routine occurence. My top 2 wish-list items for NetworkManager are • Use the DHCP server's MTU recommendation on the stupid network where 1500 doesn't work. (I appreciate that it's probably only me and five other people in the world, but it'd be nice to have this Just Work™ since the DHCP server is offering the information) • Better LLv4 support, always add the link-local route and if you can't get DHCP and choose an LLv4 address, continue occasionally requesting a DHCP address in case the server was just temporarily unavailable. This would bring my Linux desktop up to par with Windows 2000 if I'm not mistaken, at least in respect of networking.
NetworkManager Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:58 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] • Use the DHCP server's MTU recommendation on the stupid network where 1500 doesn't work. (I appreciate that it's probably only me and five other people in the world, but it'd be nice to have this Just Work™ since the DHCP server is offering the information) I think this is really up to your dhcp client. NetworkManager isn't magic, it just uses dhclient (on my system, your distributor might have made it use something else on your system).
NetworkManager Posted Apr 23, 2008 18:55 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] Use the DHCP server's MTU recommendation on the stupid network where 1500 doesn't work. I use that on jumbo frame subnets (MTU=9000). You need to configure the DHCP client to request the Interface-MTU option then rely on your distributor's scripts to set the interface accordingly (which Fedora does). The issue I have with the Fedora scripts is that they don't check the result for reasonableness, and thus are happy to set the MTU to 50, as requested by some broken hotel Internet systems. The kernel doesn't help here, as it doesn't provide user space a mechanism to obtain an interface's minimum, default and maximum MTU.. This leads to a fault when the DHCP server requires a MTU which is too large for the interface (eg, a fast ethernet interface on a ethernet jumbo frame subnet). The correct behaviour is not to bring the interface up (since IP assumes that MTUs in a subnet are consistent) but all distros bring the interface up with the default MTU (1500 on ethernet). The lack of information from the kernel doesn't really give the user-space scripts any other choice (at the very least they need to bring the interface up, note that the jumbo MTU didn't take, and then down the interface). Similarly, when the interface is downed the MTU should be set back to the default. The kernel doesn't provide enough information to do this and a table of interface technologies and default MTUs needs to be coded in user space. The emerging behaviour is that you should only set DHCP's Interface-MTU option on interfaces which support jumbo frames. This gives an elegant way for a single switch port to deliver a MTU=1500 IP subnet and a MTU=9000 IP subnet, depending upon the host's capabilities. Again, it's difficult with the Linux kernel to implement this behaviour without too much information in user space. Some site's use the Interface-MTU option to cover for their faulty Path MTU Discovery or to cover the lack of a router at a change of MTU. Allowing the relevant ICMP types through the firewall or using a router is the correct fix.
NetworkManager Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:38 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] That's interesting, can you say how to go about doing that (using DHCP to select Interface-MTU) in my NetworkManager setup ? Is there a particular file I should be editing ? Or was your example more general and you don't know how to do it when using NetworkManager ? The state of PMTU on today's Internet is pretty poor. It's not likely to improve either, sadly. But let's solve one problem at a time.
NetworkManager Posted Apr 25, 2008 18:39 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] It really depends on your DHCP client. If you are using ISC dhclient, then check out dhclient.conf(5) and dhcp-options(5). There are a whole bunch of settings with 'MTU' in the name... I have no idea what any of them do however. My point is that it is up to your DHCP client to configure your network interfaces in the way you want; it has nothing to do with NetworkManager. :)
NetworkManager Posted Apr 24, 2008 10:28 UTC (Thu) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link] For me NetworkManager pays its way just by properly managing the plug-unplug scenarios between two wired networks.Wouldn't netplug or ifplugd take care of that for you? These are relatively small tools that, at least on my Gentoo system, integrate with the existing infrastructure instead of replacing it, unlike NetworkManager apparently.
NetworkManager Posted May 18, 2008 3:42 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] I tried to assemble a minimal Ubuntu 8.04 setup using ifplugd and wpa_supplicant (together with ifupdown), and, you would guess right, this setup is broken out of the box. Because in the past, Debian/Ubuntu maintainers packaged wpa_supplicant as a standalone service, then made it a plugin into ifupdown infrastructure, and of course noone had tested if all that works under control of ifplugd.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:11 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link] NetworkManager 0.7 will support network before login. I understand one of the goals of Ubuntu is to get new code out to users quickly, and one effect of this is that apps that are still in heavy development like NetworkManager and PulseAudio get included by default. I read a lot of complaints about how these two apps get in the way of everything that used to work perfectly and can't we just go back to the old way of doing things. While there might be some rough edges, these apps are heading in the right direction and provide valuable features that just weren't possible with the old way. The Linux desktop environment is still immature, you have to make some decisions between using the old, tested apps and the cutting edge in-development apps. If you ride the cutting edge then I think you can expect to get cut occasionally. If it hurts too much, consider whether something a bit more mature is better suited to you.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 23:13 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] First, this version of Ubuntu is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means it's supposed to be stable and robust, not cutting-edge and dodgy. That doesn't mean that they can't or shouldn't have new features, but it does mean that those new features should work at least as well as the old features they replace. In the cases I'm talking about, the system simple does not work properly and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is a release that is intended to be recommended for everyone to update to, that will be supported for many years. The entire point of the LTS releases is that they do NOT contain "cutting edge in-development apps" where you "get cut occasionally". Second, while NM _may_ provide some valuable features, they are only valuable to a subset (probably even a minority) of users: those whose network configuration changes fairly regularly. There is absolutely no benefit or "new exciting capability" to using NM for anyone whose network configuration is static from startup to shutdown. If it worked as well as "the old way" for that significant portion of users that would be one thing, but if it BREAKS behavior that used to work AND provides no benefit to that section of users, then it can't be considered progress, no matter how much you might wish for it. And finally, as I made clear, NM is NOT heading in the right direction, at least WRT legacy services. It is NOT the right design decision to go around forcing all these standard, portable services to be modified to cater to some particular implementation on one particular platform. What if someone comes along tomorrow and creates NetworkSupervisor, that uses a different model than NM. Should we go modify all these network service daemons to add support for "NS"? What if next week someone creates NetConfigurator, should we add more code to support "NC"? Ridiculous. Insofar as NM requires this, it's broken by design and heading in the wrong direction. Implying I'm a luddite for wanting my system to work properly isn't going to change that fact.
A partial rebuttal Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:18 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Right now your system is heavily tied to the attached network. Not everyone agrees that this is a good thing even when they are using a desktop or workstation machine that's gathering dust because it hasn't moved for so long. What happens if the Ethernet is unplugged, or the magic smoke leaks out of your switch? I think with your non-NM setup the answer is "nothing works, you have to fix the network to get stuff working again, because it all depends on network services". That doesn't seem ideal. And indeed the work to make processes that are stuck waiting for NFS killable shows that modern users don't want to have to trek to the server room just to make their local machine work properly. The approach taken in NetworkManager recognises the reality that networks, even corporate networks with paid staff looking after them and armoured cable runs with big expensive switches and redundant power supplies, are not as reliable as individual computers, so it would be nice if the computer was still usable when the network is unavailable. Once upon a time a typical Linux desktop machine would just hang for 30-60 seconds during bootup if no network was available while it forlornly tried to obtain an DHCP lease - even if all you actually wanted to do was log on locally and show someone a presentation. Hopefully you agree that this was NOT a good feature. AFAIK Red Hat / Fedora provide a marker for services like your NIS setup that absolutely must have the network before they are started. Of course when the network isn't available (e.g. it is unplugged), the only thing it can do with that marker is wait, so it doesn't actually fix those services. But that really points to why they want actual NetworkManager support across a rich variety of services. NIS could just let local users log in until a network is attached, and then automatically find the NIS server, and begin offering network logins. Wouldn't that be nice? Can we get a grudging yes? As to this being about "one particular platform", DBus was designed with careful consideration for more than just Linux. NetworkManager-aware software isn't tied into the graphical gizmo you see, but just to DBus and to some simple event messages, like "The network has gone away". So my mail client knows it can't send email when I have no network connection and that it should try again when a network is connected, and NIS could know (but sadly doesn't seem to have been taught) that NIS lookups over the network aren't going to get any results and that it should rebind when the network is available. If it's really true that (once the bugs are worked out) this is just not acceptable to people with mostly static configurations, then it's easy to build a little application that implements the NetworkManager API but offers only two states, "manually configured as intended" and "the network is not available, nothing works". Still an improvement over your previous situation since at least applications would know what was wrong*. NetworkManager also, as I mentioned already once, makes your system do the Right Thing™ about DHCP even in a relatively static network. With a typical "dhclient once and then keep using the address" configuration from before NetworkManager, your system is only working because other systems are courteously letting it continue using an address after the lease expires. It only takes two people to ignore the rules (with your Linux desktop being one of them) and disaster ensues. * Of course the /old/ way to solve this was for every single program that cared about networking to have a privileged sub-process with a raw socket and send pings out every few seconds to see if it was still working, or else to have the ifdown script (running as root) send messages to all the programs you thought might want to know, maybe sending SIGUSR2 to them all. That's awesome, in a multi-car pileup sort of way.
A partial rebuttal Posted Apr 24, 2008 10:53 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] If the network goes down in most enterprise environments, your desktop is a paperweight and there's not much that NM, or anything else, can do about it. DNS lookups will fail. NFS (where your home directory, your cross-compiler environment, many basic shared utilities to do your job, your IDE or CAD or whatever software, etc. is stored) won't work. You can't access your email. You can't access your calendar. You can't work on documents which are all provided from a central server. You can't check bugs, which are all stored on a central server. Heck, sometimes you can't even get your phone working since it's using VOIP. Exactly what magic do you propose NM will perform, that will allow a system in a heavily networked environment to be more productive without a network than in the past? I don't get it. Even without NM, back "in the day", if the network went down I could still use my local files etc. just as before. I definitely agree that features like Upstart are great. The problem is, we do not HAVE Upstart, not really. Even after what, 2 or 3 Ubuntu releases now where it's been available, hardly anything uses it, and certainly no network services use it. DBUS may have been designed to be cross-platform but the fact is that it is not DEPLOYED cross-platform. That means for all practical purposes any change to any network service (nis, ldap, autofs, apache, mail clients, etc. etc.) that is made for this is a special case JUST for Linux. As for allowing local accounts to log in, that's already the way it works: nsswitch.conf specifies that local files are searched before NIS etc. This is a solved problem that works fine: we don't need NM for this. I also don't understand your point about DHCP and leases. My system has always had a dhclient running and it always gets new leases when my current lease expires. However, like any well-administered DHCP server, that lease always contains the same IP address, because DHCP servers keep track of which leases they hand out to which MAC addresses, and re-use them wherever possible. Only if my system was down for weeks and there was address pressure would the server hand out my IP to a different host; then when my system came back up it would get another address and all would be well. This has worked for many years before NM came along. There is really only one convincing use case for NM: when you need to change your network configuration while your system is up and running. For any system that has the same network from bootup to shutdown (and that INCLUDES just about every DHCP environment), NM is not needed. Again I want to stress, I don't object to NM just because I personally don't need it, or because I don't like new things. I object to it because it actively BREAKS simple, basic features that have worked just fine for years and years. Whether that's because of NM itself, or because it's been poorly/improperly integrated with Ubuntu and Fedora, I don't have a real opinion about. Whatever the reason, NM is not ready to be deployed in environments like Ubuntu LTS.
A partial rebuttal Posted Apr 24, 2008 20:35 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] +1 I discovered that if you "apt-get remove network-manager" then suddenly the good old debian way of network configuration starts working again, meaning you get the full power over your network as in the old times. I still use it on laptops, though.
A partial rebuttal Posted Apr 24, 2008 21:53 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] If the network goes down in most enterprise environments, your desktop is a paperweight and there's not much that NM, or anything else, can do about it. That used to be true. These days enterprises have two parallel networks -- wired and wireless. With hosts capable of dynamically selecting interfaces those two last-mile links can usefully provide resilience when a cabinet switch dies. These cabinet switches are the network component that is the currently the most difficult to make redundant.
A partial rebuttal Posted Apr 28, 2008 12:22 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] While in theory that might be true, in practice I've never seen it. Sure, there are two networks (wired and wireless); that's very common. But, for whatever reason I've never seen an environment set up so it made sense to switch back and forth dynamically. First, the wireless network is always much more secure, which means harder to use. Often you need to use a VPN to get into the secure parts of the network via wireless, for example. Second, so far nowhere that I have worked has provided a wireless NIC on desktop systems. I realize these are getting cheaper all the time but on an enterprise deployment of 1000's or even 100's of systems, that extra cost adds up. And, remember that hardware depreciation means that most developers get systems no more often than every three years (many places you only get a hardware refresh every five years, unless there's some business case). There are other difficulties I can imagine: for example, if your wired LAN goes down you don't want a massive simultaneous switching of 100's of desktop systems over to the wireless LAN, trying to use that. Or, how do you get everyone switched back over once the wired LAN is working? It may be that this makes sense in SOHO-type deployments but I have a hard time seeing how it would be practical for any reasonably-sized facility. Just MHO.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 23, 2008 11:34 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] I am so jealous of that low power consumption. I traded in an X40 (~12W) for an X61 (~15W). I had no idea the X31 was so efficient.
What Watt? Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:06 UTC (Wed) by edschofield (subscriber, #39993) [Link] Try removing nautilus ;)
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted May 7, 2008 16:47 UTC (Wed) by tytso (subscriber, #9993) [Link] I am so jealous of that low power consumption. I traded in an X40 (~12W) for an X61 (~15W). I had no idea the X31 was so efficient. It's possible to run the an X61s laptop with 8-9 watts. See my blog posting on the subject. Since it was written, I've been able to run my laptop in "airplane mode" (wireless, USB, etc. disabled, screen brightness at 40%, my inbox loaded in mutt, and reading e-mail) down to 8.7 Watts as measured by the powertop tool. This was with a 2.6.25 kernel and Ubuntu Gutsy, and with known power-wasters stopped or killed (i.e., firefox, gnome-multiload-applet, gnome-terminal blinking cursors disabled, etc.). Presumably with newer distro's some of the things that I had to do manually (i.e., unload iwl4965 if it is not in use, kill stupid GNOME applets that weren't written with power usage in mind, etc.) won't be needed any more. But its certainly possible to make an X61s only use 9 watts.
my experience with Gnome and Ubuntu Posted Apr 23, 2008 12:14 UTC (Wed) by mmarkov (subscriber, #4978) [Link] I tried briefly Ubuntu 6.06 or 6.10, can't remember precisely which. I found the software upgrade system to be superior to the one of Red Hat/Fedora and the hardware support better. However, one thing I found unbearable about Ubuntu was GNOME. It is very un-configurable compared to KDE; for starters, there is no way (or I could not find a way, even with google) to change the size of the panel, something trivial in KDE's panel. The file manager of Gnome lacks important features, e.g. terminal window or the ability to split windows horizontally/vertically. So I removed the Nautilus thing and installed Konqueror (plus all the supporting software). Then I lost the desktop - it turned out the desktop surface is somehow depended on Nautilus. Being fed up with Gnome I tried Kubuntu. ALmost immediately I found the Network Manager was buggy and that was the end of any Ubuntu on my laptop.
resize panel Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:21 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] To change the size of the panel (tested in GNOME 2.20.3) ... right click the panel, choose Properties Change the 'Size' spin widget to suit (it has live update)
my experience with Gnome and Ubuntu Posted Apr 23, 2008 23:48 UTC (Wed) by Viddy (subscriber, #33288) [Link] So 6.06 or 6.10 being buggy relates to 8.04? Seriously, the "I had a bad experience, and now I'm never ever going to use it again" is somewhat childish. I'd suggest that whilst throwing your toys and having a tantrum in the commercial world tends to get things changed, its just not how the OSS world works. The reality is that open source software tends to get gradually and inexorably better with newer revisions. Understand this, and you'll understand that the 8.04 version of Ubuntu is probably going to be better than the previous one, and therefore, probably worth a look. I do feel slightly compelled to point out that if I plug in my previously half functioning after hacking around usb bluetooth adaptor in 7.10 to my 8.04 box it now _just_works_. Thats never happened before! I can now browse files on my phone in nautilus. Thats cool. Sure, theres some bugs - I can't turn on my bluetooth headset and have it automagically appear in the gnome sound outputs, but I'm willing to wait... We're at a stage with the 7.10 version and the 8.04 version of Ubuntu where I'm finding that drivers for hardware 'just work' in Linux, and need babysitting in windows. This is a Good Thing. This means that the GNU/Linux World, is doing stuff that the windows world isn't interested in doing or just can't do.
OpenOffice Document Reorganisation Posted Apr 23, 2008 15:33 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390) [Link] One of the biggest aggravations from previous upgrades - having OpenOffice.org reformat the slides in all of your editor's presentations - was not present this time around.Wow - I thought that was just me! I feel your pain... There is actually a bug for this now Bug 109256 but I'm not holding my breath for a fix.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 24, 2008 3:57 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link] snapshot.debian.net is why I love Debian - I can install older, non-broken versions of gnome-terminal and deskbar where the cursor doesn't flash and there's a text-entry in my panel. For reference, the gnome-terminal bug is #342921, and I do like the normal cursor flashing, just not in my terminal.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 28, 2008 9:34 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] For Fedora users -- take a look at http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji
Blinken Lights Posted Apr 24, 2008 8:07 UTC (Thu) by orospakr (subscriber, #40684) [Link] Holy crap, I didn't even notice that my gnome-terminal cursor started blinking again. Gah!
Blinken Lights Posted Apr 30, 2008 12:48 UTC (Wed) by pimlottc (subscriber, #44833) [Link] Apparently my cursor has been blinking for years. Never really seemed important to me.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 25, 2008 10:52 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link] Here's some tips to unbreak Hardy, in case anyone tunes in... I had the problem that semirandomly, when I was typing in gnome-terminal, the keyboard went into some kind of locked mode and half the keypresses didn't do anything and the letters I could produce were suddenly underlined. The problem turned out to be with a package called scim, so I recommend uninstalling it. It appears to listen to ctrl+space to trigger, and ctrl+space just tends to happen to me during normal typing, maybe because I'm a bit ham-handed. (Bonus tip: xmodmap hack may be used to eliminate the \xa0 character from alt+space, which tends to break programming languages which do not treat this char-that-looks-just-like-space-except-it-isn't very well.) Each time some random program segfaults, you might get a long period of disk trashing, and then report about program crash. (Maybe this only applies during the beta versions of Hardy?) The solution is to uninstall apport, which makes crashes much less painful to experience. I suspect the crash reporting utility pulls in a lot of Python, and on slower systems such as my old laptop, it is a nightmare to experience. On laptop keyboards, F1 is often too close to Esc, and I tend to hit that accidentally, often several times in row when I try to press esc and wonder why nothing is happening. This results in immense disk churn and several copies of this stupid help program popping up. For this problem, I did not find any other way but destroying the /usr/bin/gnome-help binary. (I wrote a shell script with "exit 0" in its place.) Also: do yourself a huge favour and remove tracker. This thing churns your disk endlessly and maddeningly, and appears to slow down pretty much everything. Unless you have top-of-the-line hardware, it's worth it to kill it.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 26, 2008 19:14 UTC (Sat) by csawtell (subscriber, #986) [Link] I need a change from Gentoo, which I have been using for about 4 or 5 years, because the combination of kernel 2.6.25, OpenRC, and the Reiser4 filesystem has completely borked it. I'm posting from within PC-BSD to which I was going to change until I discovered that there isn't a port of Adobe flash for FreeBSD. ( I use the BBC news site a lot, and it's been changed to use flash film clips on almost every page. )I was going to attempt to get over my extreme allergy to the excrementally awful standard Ubuntu theme - I have changed too many nappies / diapers to be able to tolerate that particular colour as a background on my computer. So you all deserve a big vote of thanks for putting me off the idea of Gnome on Ubuntu for all the other reasons. Kubuntu perhaps? But I suspect it will have all the other problems. P.S. I have been a KDE devotee since before GNOME was a gleam in the Stallmanic eye.
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted Apr 27, 2008 2:40 UTC (Sun) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] That sounds like pretty much the Gentoo I run. 64-bit everything, kernel 2.6.25-mm1, Reiser4 /, reiserfs /boot, custom busybox initramfs. I just did the switch to OpenRC last week and all has been working well. There were upgrade instructions to read on the Gentoo web site that were definitely required.
Blinking cursor preference Posted May 1, 2008 5:09 UTC (Thu) by pieleric (guest, #51846) [Link] Here I have Mandriva with Gnome 2.22 and there is an easy accessible preference for blinking cursor (as mentioned in another post): System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Cursor Blinking If I uncheck it, the cursor in all my terminals stop blinking, instantaneously. So is this pure FUD brought by the grumpy editor, or has ubuntu removed this preference?
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted May 16, 2008 5:14 UTC (Fri) by ralph (guest, #23686) [Link] Your suggestion stops all cursors blinking. It used to be there was a system wide setting for the one-pixel wide thin cursor used in text areas. That's useful because it can sometimes be hard to spot. And gnome-terminal had its own setting for its great big fat hairy cursor. That's useful because the cursor stands out anyway, without blinking. Gnome decided to ditch gnome-terminal's own one. Uproar ensued. Gnome are being particularly stupid on this. They've agreed it was a mistake but are refusing to back out the patch, instead insisting someone write a new patch that gives gnome-terminal a three way (blink/no blink/use system default) setting. Thankfully, Ubuntu look to be reverting the patch and not wait for Gnome. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/...
The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron Posted May 18, 2008 4:29 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] And yes, Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 tend to dim my laptop screen backlight to the minimum. Even when running on mains power. And of course it does not support my Atheros chip mentioned in MadWifi bug 1679. I have to use [K]ubuntu 7.10 with older kernel and older MadWifi patch. I have Asus Z99Le with A8Le motherboard. Pretty common variety here.
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