The good news is my 8.1 update went pretty smooth and I was back in business within a few hours. 8.1 has solved a lot of quirky problems I have with 8.0, things like not being able to run the sawfish config from the control panel.
Installing on a Dell L700cxe and updating a partially upgraded 8.0 installation, I ran into the following easily solvable (if you know how ;) glitches: - /dev/cdrom was symlinked to "../cdroms/cdrom0" instead of "cdroms/cdrom0" and what is most peculiar was that "rm -f /dev/cdrom" was simply ignored (perhaps automount re-builds it every time it is deleted?) I solve the problem by simply symlinking /dev/cdroms to /cdroms - my USR/3Com 56k Voice INT v5.20.1 modems were mis-identified as USR Faxmodem 5610, and thus would only refer me to the winmodem page. There are no non-winmodem USRs in the options list in the control panel's hardware config section, but the model 83329800 are /not/ winmodems (they are pretty good modems for Linux, supported by all the voicemail and fax software). This was solved by hand-symlinking /dev/modem to /dev/ttyS4 (and modem2 to ttyS5) - /usr/bin/ftp does not work with XEmacs -- it gives an error about not understanding a 500 AUTH message; prior to this, I also found that the default firewall would not allow the passive FTP connections that are needed by the plain FTP program. I solved this by simply copying the pftp program from 8.0. Some minor annoyances: - All TK programs and the menu-bars in XEmacs have turned a lemon yellow (using Gnome and sawfish) and I can't find any option to turn them back to white. Any pointers are most welcome. - related to this, TK applications with radio buttons do not show the pushed state; the only app I have to check this (so far) is dctrl that comes with diald -- all of the log-setting options can be clicked (and the log window shows the toggle is seen by the program) but the widget itself does not show any change of state. In XEmacs, similar widgets show a very faint change of state (on the lemon-yellow background) but in dctrl, there is no change at all. - 8.1 appears to have broken XEmacs's JDE, which is a real problem for me since I depend on JDE to do my job :( ... it gives errors about the wrong number of arguments to semantic-flex-make-keyword-table - Also related to the desktop, 8.0 had disabled my LeftAlt=Meta key and someone sent me instructions to map Meta to the WindowMenu key. With 8.1, the default for the Meta key is back to LeftAlt ... except that I became very accustomed to using the WindowMenu key (and have no other use for it). How do I change this back? - Pingus hangs in X11 mode, and crawls in glx mode. I've been waiting years and years to play pingus, and it looks like I'll be waiting a bit longer ;) - on my first update, /usr/share/timidity/timidity.conf was missing I reinstalled the package and it's there now, but bank 0 has no defined instruments; kmidi will play, but in timidity, all instruments are silent. So far, that's it. Not a single show-stopper, and although the symlink fixes took some expertise to solve, the solution would be easy enough to tell even a novice over the telephone. One other minor cosmetic glitch: In the hardware list for modems, there are many brands that appear in the list 4 or 5 times (consecutively) with no clear difference between them. That list box needs to be looked at if we expect relative novices to select their modems from that list. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723 T(C)Inc Business Innovations through Open Source http://www.teledyn.com "what I need is a job that doesn't interfere with my work" -gary murphy
