Incoming from Aaron J. Seigo: > On April 20, 2004 05:43, s. keeling wrote: > > You have apparently not seen all the posts from people who installed > > only to find gnome when they wanted kde (or vice versa) and wanted to > > find out how to get the other one. Let me tell ya, it ain't easy if > > you're relying on [xkg]dm and the generally shipped defaults. All the > > [xkg]dm's do things a little differently, don't bother to recognize > > how the others do it, and consequently end up tripping over each other > > or clobbering each other. > > sounds like you've borne the brunt of extremely bad packaging. or you tried
No, I've borne the brunt of simply trying to use the supplied tools ([xkg]dm, .xsession, .xinitrc, & etc.) and trying to change my desktop from one of these monstrosities to another. They don't understand how each other do things, so just saying (on the [xkg]dm login screen) "Select $BLAH", and I end up with (maybe!) $BLAH, _plus_ various and sundry other cruft from the old one still running. If you choose one and stay there, you can minimize the problem. If you want to go between them to try them out, you end up with a mess. Try this: run plain old fluxbox. Now start up irssi-gnome. Why do I now have a gnome-panel on my screen?!? That's just a hint of some of the stupid things I've seen these monsters do. Solution: "rxvt -e irssi &" As for where I've run into these things: SuSE 7.0 Professional, SuSE 7.1 Personal, Libranet 2.0, Debian Woody/stable. None of those are flakily designed distributions. I've asked about this in debian-user and they agree. None of the monstrosities understand how the others do it, and just dance around each other trying to stay out of each other's way. They can't even do that much right. > into these problems? honestly, for MOST people having a display manager is > far easier for them and doesn't present anything resembing a problem. I agree, if they pick one and stick with it. > > Add in KDE and Nautilus and you have a mess. > > My advice: rip it out. Choose a window manager you can control. > > lol ... by window manager, i assume you mean "desktop", and by "desktop" i No. By window manager, I mean "X Window Manager", as in twm, fvwm, wm2, fluxbox, & etc. I can build my own damn desktop, with the apps I want to run. I've been doing it since '93, and I never had much trouble with Linux until kde and gnome arrived on the scene. They may be perfect for dumbing down the interface to the point that Aunt Tilly can use it. They're a lot like Wintendo's eye candy for me. Ever got any useful information from a Windows Help file? Same thing. > as for the term "you can control" that is highly subjective. When I started, I used fvwm. Everything was controlled by .fvwmrc. Now I use fluxbox. To change anything, I edit ~/.fluxbox/init or something. What file do I edit to tell Nautilus to go away and never return? Which of the many .gnome-* directories contains the file that controls what I want to change? Ditto for kde. How many times have you heard someone say, "My KDE is screwed up. What's the fix?" "rm -rf ~/.kde dude!" Brilliant. > i don't agree with your summary dismisal of the utility of desktop panels, > etc... however. the beauty of Free Software is choice, allowing each to > choose what works best for them. the danger of choice is the myopic nature of > humans to feel that their choice is obviously superior in general because it Blah, blah, blah. I got locked out of one too many servers running kde, by dcop-server. Only months ago, I learned that the fix is to restart kdeinit. Life is too damn short for that kind of silliness. If it doesn't get started up, it can't get in the way. -- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling - - _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
