A few comments about Knoppix 5.1
Note: I'm commenting the product as a whole, without making any
distinction between what depends on Klaus' worl and Debian developers
work. This is not an in-depth test, just what strikes teh user at
first sight.
First, the good:
My very rare printer, an HP Laserjet 1012, which hasn't worked
since... Knoppix 3.7, I believe, now works. The fonts in Iceweasel
URL window are now large enough to be read. The default font in
Iceweasel itself look OK.
Now, the bad:
I suppose many people would have prefered if Klaus had rewritten the
new installer. But the old one is still there, a new version may be
out more realistically in a month or two... and I believe it was time
for a new release.
This time, the background is plain ugly, which is quite unusual.
In Iceweasel, it's still impossible to search using the very
convenient lenght of the URL Window. The ridiculous small search
window is still there for no use at all.
When you click on Klipper and the message "are you sure you want to
quit" appears, if you click "Cancel", you quit just the same. To put
Klipper back, the little arrows that delimited the system tray have
disappeared. When newbie has found that there's somewhere a clickable
area, a menu opens to add applets. Unfortunately, Klipper is not part
of it. You must go to Control Center to put it back. Nice sabotage!
The keyboard I use, the CA, is still unavailable. Yes, there is a CA
in the list, but it's not the CA, it's the CF. Nice sabotage here
too: this used to be perfect before Knoppix 5.0. (That's when the
problem appeared.)
In K3B, if you want to back up only your hidden files -- .mozilla, for
exemple -- they're nowhere to be found. You've got to thansfer your
whole directory with the gigabytes of files of your pictures and
films directory, then remove those, to have your hidden files. Let's
bet that newbies just won't back-up their news and mail directories.
That's *really* a nice sabotage!
In OOo, diacritic characters produced usually with two stokes, such as
ç, à, è, ü, etc, do not appeared. This had been corrected in the
previous release, it's back too. How nice!
After lots of fiddling, I finally got the windows media files on this
page:
http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/
(Click the cameras)
to play with Kaffein, not MPlayer. Finding Kaffein would be next to
impossible for a newbie.
Yes, I know, I could write to developers all over the world, check the
bug list, file bugs, see it disclassified because considered not
release critical and spend months trying to get undone what some
Microsoft-paid drone inside Linux has done in 15 seconds. And, of
course, I'd be told that what Linux is all about is becoming a
developer and fixing problems that pop and repop all over the place.
And face the same bugs in a release or two.
At the present time, Linux is hovering around 0.30% of the visits on
the net because there is no quality control whatsoever. Things work,
don't work, work, don't work, etc, usw, People get fed up.
I've been using Linux exclusively for the last 5 years and hoping that
Linux would make it for the last 10 years. But, no way, the
development model just doesn't work. I'm getting fed up too. I'll
check the next release of Debian and if I face the same damned
problems, I'll switched to Mac OS X. Then, there will be no coming
back. Linux's development for developers will be able to proceed
without ranters like me in a computer world where all the standards
will be set for proprietary software.
If some developer can reproduce the bugs I'm talking about here, mail
them to Debian who will either fix them or forward them upstream to
developers. That would be nice. I had myself very little luck at this
game. Sorry, I'm fed up!
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