Re: wtf? (long and frustrated)
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Kent West wrote:
> It sounds like you're running XFree86 3.x; I think upgrading to 4.x
> would be of benefit to you. Of course, the easiest way to do that is to
> leave Woody behind and go for Sid or Testing. I run Sid on my
> workstations (Stable/Woody on servers); every once in a while a problem
> comes up that takes a couple of weeks to get ironed out, but those
> instances are rare, and seldom catastrophic, so I find Sid perfectly
> suitable for workstation use. This way you get the newer stuff, like X 4.
I've got to jump in here. I just tried Debian for the first time the other
day. I put it on a spare computer, just to see if I could. (I had tried a
couple years ago, and couldn't even get it installed.) It worked, so I
tried it on my samba print server. That was painful. It took me many hours
of fooling around -- including dumping cups and trying lprng and going
back again -- before I could even print from the server, let alone through
samba. That took another couple hours and a google'd email answer to a Mac
users question to find that I needed to uncomment a couple lines in my
cups mime.* files.
Not being deterred -- after all, I've learned hard lessons with *all*
OSes -- I forged on with my main workstation, and immediately apt-get
dist-upgraged it to unstable.
Again. Pain.
dpkg-reconfigure just would *not* give me a workable X config. I got it
going with xf86config and some hand tweaks, but man! Come on. Other
distros have had this part figured out for *years.* There's no excuse for
this mess, and I totally feel for the guy who started this thread.
On top of that, I couldn't get my gpm config working. Yeah, I know.
`gpmconfig'. But, again, it couldn't give me a workable configuration.
Apparently, the imps2 driver in gpm is currently broken? I dunno. (And
don't bother, I have already aborted installing Gentoo on this box, tried
Mandrake 9, and am currently installing Red Hat's beta.)
The last straw was fontconfig, which is a confirmed kill. It's currently
broken for selecting monospace fonts. I don't know about anyone else, but
fonts are the most important thing to me. I'm a long-time Red Hat user,
and I skipped the 8.0 release because of frustrations with their fonts. (I
am saddened by their direction on updates and support lifetimes. This is
why I was trying Debian.)
The bottom line is that Debian is current enough to suit my desktop needs,
and it seems to be more painful than it should be for my server needs. I'm
glad it works for others, because I think it's a powerful thing in the
Linux community. And, I'll probably wind up there when I can't get Red Hat
for free any more.
dk
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