Re: Comment

[amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk (Andrew M.A. Cater)]

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:05:56AM +0800, Uwe Dippel wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> as a long-time friend and user of Debian, I need to rant slightly here.
> I am currently running three Debian Desktops, without any problem, until 
> Etch hit the streets. Now, after upgrade, none of them works / worked 
> properly any more. Not that the things were minor: printing failed to a 
> huge bug in lpr (#422177), which forgot to install the module for 
> parallel port. 

I suspect you may have fallen foul of the fact that few people use lpr 
any more and that CUPS seems to have taken over. Also, possibly, that 
more and more people are using printers with USB connectivity. Switch
to using CUPS and its associated drivers?

> Nvidia legacy is broken, actually preventing me from 
> using that system at all (#423592). 

Use the (DFSG-free) nv driver from xorg? OK, it's only 2D - but it will
get you out of the silliness that is Nvidia legacy support at the moment

> My individual settings for xfce4 are 
> completely lost, actually making it impossible to use xfce4 with the old 
> settings; since they prevent the xfce4 menu from appearing.
> 

I don't use xfce, so can't really comment. Did you, by any chance, keep 
a backup of what the old settings were so that you could recreate them
from scratch if need be? Reinstall xfce4 with vanilla settings / delete
your config files in your home directory and take it through step by 
step until you can reproduce your old configuration as nearly as 
practicable.

> I really wonder where in here QA has happened ...
> 

QA has happened: I've been using Etch for as long as it has been around 
and fixes and testing have been going on throughout.

If the specific bugs you've mentioned weren't tweaked by anyone during 
that time, then that's unfortunate but you can't exhaustively test for 
the presence/absence of every bug: the combinations would become infinite 
pretty soon.

> Kind regards,
> 
> Uwe
> 
Have a good day,

Andy