On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 17:37, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> On Saturday 15 January 2005 05:26 pm, Vaughn Treude kindly wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 January 2005 10:45, you wrote:
> > > I'm running Slackware 10.0 and KDE 3.2.3. I had stuff set up the way I
> > > like it, and little by little things seem to be breaking. I've noticed
> > > this before, and it's almost like I need to do a fresh install to get
> > > everything working again. I'm waiting for 10.1 to come out before I do
> > > another install.
> >
> > How strange! I must admit I haven't used Slackware in years, but software
> > rot is something I associate only with MS systems. I have had some
> > occasional trouble with my notebook (RH 7.3) probably due to frequent
> > reboots; a while ago the sound stopped working with I think was due to a
> > corrupted device file. (I know the hardware is OK because it still works
> > when I boot it into Windows.) Do you reboot or turn your system off
> > frequently? My two Linux tower systems are pretty much left on all the
> > time, and I don't have trouble unless I've done substantial monkeying with
> > the libraries. (That would be a good topic for a talk sometime - what are
> > the rules for compatibility of different library versions, etc., etc.)
>
> I reboot maybe once a month or less often. If we have a bad thunderstorm, or
> if I want to open the case and clean the fan filter screens, but that's about
> it.
> >
> > > For instance, I used to be able to play music CD's from the CD-ROM drive,
> > > either by pressing the play button on the drive or using the KDE CD
> > > player or XMMS. I can't do that anymore. It doesn't "see" /dev/hdd
> > > anymore. It used to work, then a few months ago it got all glitchy. I
> > > managed to reconfigure things somehow in the CD player app and it worked,
> > > but now it's failed again. Any apps I try to use generally lock up while
> > > searching for the drive. If it finds the disc at all, it plays for one
> > > second then stops.
> > >
> > > When I press the play button on the drive itself, it revs up then slacks
> > > off, over and over. It used to work, now it doesn't. I haven't changed
> > > anything in /etc/fstab, or anything else that I know of. I know the drive
> > > is good because I use it for ripping stuff to my harddrive all the time.
> >
> > That's strange too. The only time I've had intermittent trouble with CD or
> > DVD drives is when they're on the verge of going bad.
> >
This is a hardware problem, if you are using the play button on the cd
drive and even that doesnt work... that drive play button functionality
is soley hardware. It has nothing do do with the OS in nearly any way.
> > > Another example is SMTP in Kmail. It will work fine for months, then
> > > suddenly I can't send mail from tigerflag.com, and neither can my husband
> > > in his user account. I get an error message that it can't find the
> > > account. This happened a few months ago. At one point I rebooted the
> > > computer and things were fine again. When it happened yesterday, I
> > > finally toggled the default account to intergate.com (I use two accounts:
> > > smtp.intergate.com and smtp.tigerflag.com) and it started working again
> > > for _both_ accounts. It was like something got jammed, and once I
> > > successfully sent from intergate.com, then tigerflag.com worked again. It
> > > doesn't make any sense!
> >
> > Can you still browse the web when this happens?
>
> Yes, and I can receive mail, too. But when SMTP gets corrupted or whatever it
> is, I have to remove all my mail in the Outbox que, and toggle the default
> SMTP account to get it to work again. Then both accounts work again.
Are you on dialup? One thing that comes to mind is perhaps you were
trying to send a very large attachment and exeeding the timeout period
for your isp's smtp server. At any rate I have never personally been a
fan of the kde base apps, you could try evolution, personaly I have
never had any real issue with it, others have, your milage may vary.
However there are tons of mail user agents out there.
> >
> > > While I'd appreciate any suggestions for fixing the CD problem, I'm
> > > actually more interested in why my setup seems to be deteriorating over
> > > time.
> > >
> > Sorry I can't offer much in the way of advice, but hopefully someone else
> > will have a different perspective. Good luck!
> >
> > Vaughn
>
I have never seen any distro deteriorate as m$ systems are so famous for
doing. And especially not slackware, its about the least technicaly
complex linux distros out there. However fortunately linux gives you the
power to choose, and I would suggest looking for alternatives to
software which does not work well for you. Personaly KDE in general has
given me problems (every distro I have used), it seems rather flaky
dispite all the prase it gets. Metacity/Gnome is pretty damn flaky too
as a desktop (nautilus is very unstable). So my personal choice is
windowmaker, or another utterly simple windowmanager.
However, Slackware also does not do anything for you, so unless you want
to learn continually about the inner workings of linux (thats specificly
why I used it several years ago) I would suggest redhat, mandrake, or
suse. This will help prevent percieved deterioation.
Thanks for your support, anyway. I feel like I'm either going crazy or
really
> dumb about something...
>
> Siri Amrit
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--
Entelin <
entelin@logicaldreams.net>
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