Instability problems with Mandrake 7.0

[Shawn T. Rutledge]

On Sun, Aug 20, 2000 at 03:27:11PM -0700, Mark Berkwitt wrote:
> KLyX seemed to install ok, but I don't know how to start it.

Did you try opening an xterm and typing "klyx"?

> two kfm windows, dragging and dropping from one to another.  It kinda
> stalled and then froze.  I couldn't do anthing but kill the X server

Oh well, I don't trust any of the filemanager thingies that exist.
They all have their problems.  It's best to just bite the bullet and
learn how to use the command line effectively.  I don't know why it
should be so hard to write a file manager that works, there sure are 
enough of them.

The Gnome folks are promising that in Gnome 2.0 it's going to actually
work, because they're going to rewrite it from scratch instead of
building on top of Midnight Commander.

Right now its biggest flaw seems to be that it gets out of sync
easily... if you do something to the filesystem anywhere else, it
doesn't notice the changes.  (Like even if I click the mount applet
on my taskbar to mount a floppy or a CD, it doesn't notice all the
new directories that showed up under the mount point.)  Probably
goes to show that the filesystem needs some kind of notification
service built-in, so that the file manager can subscribe for events;
but I guess they haven't thought of that yet.  And if they had, 
they'd still be fighting over which kind of event service to use,
probably.  (Since ORBit doesn't do COSEvents, shame on it...)

> with the alt Cntl Backspace combo.  BTW, I'm logged in as admin because
> I'm installing software, or trying.
> Since then, Netscape freezes, kfm still freezes at times, and rebooting
> hasn't helped.

Netscape does freeze sometimes.  Usually on web pages that do too
much complex stuff (Javascript etc.).  And when it's busy doing a
DNS lookup, it can't seem to do anything else, not even repaint the
screen.  Rather stupid design not to multithread that part.  But
there aren't any other good choices either, unless your luck with
Mozilla is better than mine.  Opera sounds promising but isn't
full-featured yet, last I checked.

It helps to make sure netscape is really gone before you restart it:

ps auxw | grep nets
if you see any netscape processes, kill them:  kill 3456 or whatever
ps auxw | grep nets
if the process is still there,
kill -9 <pid>  (kill with extreme prejudice  :-)
if you had to do kill -9 then you probably also need to do this:
rm ~/.netscape/lock

It'd be nice if a windowmanager could automate this... like provide
a mechanism to have custom kill scripts for certain applications.

> On another point, I don't know if the kde vs. gnome is an issue for
> anyone else, but my love affair with kde is eroding.  I think I like the
> file manager of gnome a little more, but starting it causes many desktop

Well you can delete the desktop icons.  They're supposed to be convenient,
but I sortof don't like the mixed metaphor... _some_ things are started
from the taskbar, and _some_ things from desktop icons.  Then again,
the desktop is a lot of wide-open real estate, might as well use it
for something besides pretty pictures.

> Last point, does anyone really know about program installation?  No
> offense, but I'm beginning to think that the people who really know
> linux don't waste their time with linux questions like mine.  

The trouble with things like WordPerfect is that they are not tailored
for any particular distro... they just went off and did their own thing.
It would be easier if your distro came with a specialized installer
using RPMs (or DEBs in Debian's case).  Debian has actually done this
for a few third-party programs, like RealPlayer.  You download the 
third-party tarball into /tmp, and then install the deb, and it sucks
it in and rips it up and puts the files where the Debian folks believe 
they belong.  (They're religious about following the filesystem standard.)

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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