On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 04:18:43PM -0800, Ben Barrett wrote: > >I helped a co-worker do a Knoppix install on his Dell 5100 and noticed >that the *unstable* apt sources were in there by default. Ack? >
Yes; most everyone is using either those or testing. I was using stable, wherein begins a rant. I have a Synaptics touchpad on my laptop. I want to be able to use the mouse either in the console or in X. GPM, the mouse server program, supports a repeater mode. Unfortunately the version of GPM in debian-stable is several revs old, and does not repeat fully the protocol for the mouse which i have. I tried it in raw mode, and while i could indeed mouse in X, it did not have things like movement acceleration, so i would creep across the desktop. I examined the website of the GPM maintainer, and found that the latest GPM would correctly repeat a Synaptics touchpad, and moreover supported tuning of nice features like edge-scrolling that i never expected to work outside of Windoze. Having heard that a new release of Debian was due out before 2004, i went to the website and queried the web interface for the package information about GPM in the testing branch, which will become the stable branch. It was told that the version number of the GPM in that release will be a higher one than the one in stable, but will still not be up to the version that supports my mouse. This event was trivial enough in itself, the more so in that i was able to download the maintainer's tarball and build a current GPM, but it was symptomatic of the increasingly creaky Debian release system. It needs to change, perhaps along the lines of Joseph's vision for the package pools, before it becomes entirely antiquated. -- "That time in Seattle... was a nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive." --Neal Stephenson, "Cryptonomicon" _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
