banjo

I agree with this. And people stop being lazy when the effects of their bad habits become painful enough that it is worthwhile to invest in new tools. I think that with fnWindoze we have reached that point. I know people who have been using fnWindoze for years, and now they rant at me about how horrible XP is. They are sick of the spyware and sick of the intrusions and sick of having their computer hosed by automatic upgrades. They are sick of having to spend money on protection software to keep the nasties out of their system. These people are so upset, that they are literally yelling at me. (Why me? They gotta yell at *somebody*, and Gates ain't listenin') So, I tell them that I am using Linux, and it has none of those problems and that they should consider moving to Linux. The immediate answer is "That is too hard for me." or "I need my Windows applications to do my work." It is the apps that they are worried about. Another big excuse I hear is "All my work is in .doc format." and "I need to send documents to colleagues, and .doc format is the standard." Lazy? Maybe. But I think that "terrified of big changes" may be closer. If Linux continues to be for "hackers only", you will not bring those people over to the good side. It has to be a friendly playground or they will not come. Just my $0.02. Banjo (_)=='=~

I still think that the key is in the apps. People are worried that they will not be able to do the things that they used to do because the apps are all different and they are difficult to deal with, use, install, upgrade, etc. Those people are wrong, of course. Linux is more stable than fnWindoze, and the apps are just as good (or better). But the perception is there. From my perspective, upgrading the apps is, indeed, a bit more difficult than with fnWindoze, but for the most part, the apps on Linux are better than the apps on fnWindoze. The Linux apps are more modern. For example, I store my documents in native OOo format now because it is based on XML instead of a proprietary binary like the .doc format. Similarly, I have moved to Inkscape for graphics because of the standard svg format. fnWindoze proprietary binary is old-think. Pre-installed and easily upgraded apps; that is the key. Banjo (_)=='=~

I work in semiconductor as well. The equipment that we build runs on fnWindows 2000. It is inappropriate and causes all sorts of trouble. I have told the bosses that the next generation of our product will be on VxWorks and Linux, or count me out! Banjo (_)=='=~

Ya, well, I guess you would still get your regular complaints about the broken cup holders........ This board is way more helpful than the official help desks of the big box fnWindoze companies. The last time (and I do mean the LAST time) that I called the Gateway help desk, the woman who answered (after a 20 minute hold) did not have a clue what I was talking about (floppy disk resources) and finally just hung up on me. That was the end of Gateway for me. Well, there are lots of boards where answers can be obtained for fnWindose problems, but it they rarely feature the developers. The Quanta folks are very approachable and are working their butts off to make an awesome app. Banjo (_)=='=~

If you track down all of the technology that is required just to type an email and send it, people would be amazed at how complex it all is. There are thousands of pieces of hardware and software that must work together to get that job done. There are dozens of protocols that must be used and millions of lines of code. Any one of them can go wrong and make it all stop. When people ask me how it works, and I try to explain it, they glaze over immediately. But then, if you track down all of the technology that makes your car run, you will also have the same situation, including material science, physics, mechanics, chemistry, and.......... egad.......... even software these days. And yet idiots still learn to drive their cars. The mass market is in selling to the idiots. That is where Billy Gates has made his dough. Linux needs to be made superficially understandable by idiots. Perhaps we need to sell Linux computers with everything pre-installed and a maximum of three buttons on it. We could include one of those no-words, pictures-only instruction sheets that explain what the three buttons do. Then we sell it cheap, say $300. Since Linux is so much more stable than fnWinblows, the help desk for such a product would be a lot less busy than the Dell or Gateway help desk. I think there is a market there to be tapped. Banjo (_)=='=~

I think that Crashdamage and FX have hit the problem on the head. They articulated it much better than I did. My entire family has been converted to Linux for a year and a half now. It took about a day for them to get used to it and learn how to use it. Even my wife, who has little knowledge of how computers work, just jumped right in and started using it. So much for ease of use. Mandrake is already there. But they have me for their sys admin. And therein lies the rub, because I have been using Unix since 1975, and I set this thing up and keep it running. It has been tricky at times, even for me. So, until we can get by that problem, Linux will not grab the desktop away from fnWindoze. Banjo (_)=='=~

Gowator wrote: Thanks for that tip. It never occurred to me to downgrade. I really use very few of the fancy features of most apps. I tend to stick to the basics. So a downgrade could be just the ticket. But I did not aim my discussion at getting my particular issues with the apps solved. I will work that out eventually. My point was to add to the discussion about why the Linux desktops are not taking over the market. Linux desktops are so obviously superior to fnWindoze (at least to me) that it is puzzling why they have not already destroyed fnWindoze completely. And yet, when I talk it up to people I know, they say "That is really cool, but it is too hard for me" and then they go back to their crashing, spamming, fnWindoze system and tolerate it. I don't get it. We are missing something. Here is another interesting quote, from iphitus So, maybe the problem is that we are still playing catchup, and it is still a waiting game before we take over. My poor old Mandy 9.1 is so far superior to any fnWindows system that it is hard to imagine what 10.x has in it. It must be really nice. I will have to investigate an upgrade. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

I think that this is partially true. One of the ways that Billy Gates made such massive inroads into the desktop was to force the vendors to pay for fnWindows for every PC that they sold........ whether they actually installed it or not. So they installed it. However, there currently are vendors who install Linux on PC's. You can buy 'em online at WalMart, and I think that Dell offers them too. They don't sell in large quantities. One more story. I have a Dell with Win98SE on it. The whole setup is about six years old. When I set up my Verizon DSL a couple of months ago, I had to use it because the setup program required fnWindoze. When I ran the setup program it complained about my old browser (IE 4) and it installed a new one (IE 6) and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, it was done. No alphabet soup. No OS upgrade. No gibberish to read. No tutorials to search. On a 6 year old, out-of-date platform. I got lucky. My linux box is less than two years old. Hardware and software both. I cannot upgrade my apps without jumping through hoops. As I said, this is not a problem for me because I understand that the technology has moved on. I have simply not had time to upgrade. But most of the computer users I know, especially the home computers, would find that appalling. Right or wrong, they think that is barbaric. I can't put my finger on exactly what is wrong, but it feels like the Linux camp is missing a piece for getting regular folks to use it. I have a colleague at work who has a PhD in physics. He has inherited his wife's old computer to play with because he got her a new one. He was going to put WinXP on it until he saw the price. So, I burned him a Knoppix CD and gave it to him so he could try out Linux. He booted it, and was blown away. With no installation at all, in five minutes he was surfing the net on his old PC on Linux. You cannot make an OS that is easier to use than that. "Works just like Windows" he said. Then he took out the CD and put it in the drawer and went back to fnWindows. He is trying to find a cheaper way to get WinXP. Something is missing. Banjo (_)=='=~

I think that I need to clarify my statements. I am NOT defending fnWindoze at all. I bailed out of fnWindoze upon the first announcement of the WinXP fiasco. I run strictly Linux, and my current system is Mandy 9.1. It works great. I love it. It is a rock compared to my old Dell with fnWindoze 98SE (which crashes three or four times a day). My statement was directed at the problem that Linux is having of taking over the mass desktop market. The perception is that it is too hard to use. I find that, for me, fnWindoze is harder to work with than Linux because everything MUST be done using their fnWizards, and you never know what it is doing to your system. My Linux is open, so I can make it do what I want it to do. But......... the desktop market is not going to be gained by addressing the system toward those of us who understand this stuff. My suggestion was not intended to make Linux "better", and it certainly was not to complain about it or say it is "hard". It was intended as a suggestion to make it more.......... um........ how do I say this?....... "presentable" to the general population. I believe that the original topic of this post was "The future of Linux. Will it ever catch on?" It has not caught on in the general population. The folks who are moving to Linux are the cognescenti, who understand how much better it is. The mass market lies in the millions of people who use computers without having a clue. I think we have shot ourselves in the foot in that regard. Just my $0.02. The people I have tried to sell on Linux have indicated to me that they could never deal with it. I know that they would run right back to their old fnWindoze box, viruses and trojans and all, at the first page of alphabet soup that shows up on an install. The mass market desktop belongs to the OS that deals with that issue. BTW, this is a great board. As a help desk, this blows away any of the fnWindoze help desks that expect you to sit on hold for 20 minutes just to reach the cleaning lady in India who tells you to reinstall the OS. Banjo (_)=='=~

Quanta was just the app I have been working with lately. The same problems apply to more mainstream apps like OpenOffice and browsers. Maybe I am just doing it wrong. The pointy clicky fire-off rpm is pretty easy to figure out. Right after that, I get a bunch of finger-wags from the system saying "Nope. You can't do that." That is what happened with both the Quanta and the Audacity. Urpmi is still a blackbox for me. I'm not sure how to use it properly. Last time I looked at the recommended sources, I could not find the upgrade packages I was looking for. I have lost the details of that adventure. What sources do you use? I also have seen a pointer on this board about how to set up Easy Urpmi, but I have lost that as well. Banjo (_)=='=~

Gowator, Thanks for the pointer. I will go check it out. I know nothing about Debian. Also, my system is in use by the whole family, and they are wary of me making major changes to it. Down time is difficult to schedule. I do not know what is involved with a distro switch or a major upgrade. Do you have any pointers to ideas about the best way to upgrade the system while preserving the current application/user base? I might move to Mandy 10 if it did not involve any huge sacrifices. Banjo (_)=='=~

Linux is certainly not going to take over the desktop market any time soon, and I will tell you a couple of stories to explain why. I run Quanta+ to update my web pages. It is a terrific tool. I especially like the upload manager, which looks at file change times and knows which files to upload. However, there is a bug in the Quanta+ version that came with Mandy 9.1. The project file is not updated properly upon exit, so some files get stuck as "changed" when, indeed, they have actually been uploaded since the change. Those files are then doomed to be uploaded again and again...every time I do an upload.... in perpetuity. This bug makes the upload feature largely useless. So, I contacted the folks who work on Quanta and asked about the bug. The answer was to upgrade my Quanta+. This is a fair answer, because that is how bugs get fixed.... in later releases. So off I went to upgrade Quanta. To make a really long and frustrating story short, it appears that it is impossible to upgrade Quanta without upgrading my entire distro! I tried a later RPM and that failed on dependencies of core utilities like GTK and KDE. Then I downloaded the source and tried to build the app. I was dumped immediately into Dependency Hell and started installing development tools from my distro CD's. After several hours of that, I ran into a fatal compile error, and the solution was to do a CVS make to get the latest, after which, Make itself would do nothing but bail out with errors. I worked for hours on this problem and failed miserably in the end. I finally "fixed" my problem by writing a program myself, which I call "qtouch" that will parse a Quanta+ project file and touch all of the upload times. I now happily use my Quanta+ to edit my files and upload the modified files to my host. Then I run qtouch on the project file to make it all new again. Yay! Problem solved. I love my Quanta+ again. However, how many desktop users out there in the world would be willing to go through all of that just to use an app? How many desktop users out there would even understand what I have just been talking about? How many desktop users out there are capable of writing a C program to hack an XML project file to fix an application bug? XML? What the heck is XML? C? What the heck is C? Here is a hypothetical situation about finding a similar problem on an fnWindows system..... (don't get me wrong here, I am NOT promoting fnWindows, which I hate... but the truth is the truth.....) 1) A user has an application on fnWindoze that s/he likes. 2) App has a major show-stopper bug. 3) User asks about it and the answer is "upgrade" 4) User downloads later version and installs it ... problem solved I am no fan of fnWindows, but fnWindoze application upgrades often get installed with a minimum of heartburn (or they trash your entire system, but hey.....). The fnWindows application writers take great pains to make their upgrades backward compatible. In fact a clean application that is written to run on Win32 API will often install and run on many versions of fnWindoze with no problems. I have written some applications like that myself. Win32API is Win32API. Unless the app writer has been stupid enough to demand the latest "features" of the latest fnWindoze, the programs are pretty portable. You will often see a list of system requirements for an application that will be like this: "Requires: Win98, Win98SE, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP.... What is the point of all this? Well here it is. Until the developers and distributors of Linux systems... that is.... entire systems, including the desktop software and development software and connectivity software...... have stabilized the system and FROZEN it....... so that later versions of apps can be successfully installed on older versions of it..... WITHOUT major upgrades to the system..... and until the writers of applications make use of STABLE system utilities that do not change from application release to application release......the Linux desktop is doomed to be the playground ONLY of dedicated hackers. The basic core systems of Linux desktops are changing fast. When the application writers demand that the latest and greatest features of the latest and greatest desktops be there in order for the program to run, the applications will not be backward compatible. Hence it will be impossible to upgrade them to fix simple bugs. I have a similar tale to tell about Audacity, which crashes any time I try to set the preferences. The "fix" is to upgrade to the next version, which cannot be done. The workaround is to edit the .Audacity file using gvim in order to set my preferences. I cannot even *explain* this to my fnWindoze-lovin' friends much less convince them that it is the way to go. In fact, I cannot remember being able to successfully upgrade ANY Linux application on my Mandy 9.1 without running into serious dependency problems with some CORE utility in the system. If it did not come on the Mandy 9.1 distro disks, it will not install and run. This is not a big problem for me because I find workarounds for bugs and continue on. This IS a problem for the computing public because they do not have the time/desire/ability to hack at their apps to keep them working, or re-install the entire software system, which is a daunting prospect. Let me state once again that I am NOT proposing fnWindoze as a superior system. I hate it, and I will not go back to it. It is snake-oil that is sold by money-grubbing, dishonest people whose only purpose is to separate us from our money and inflict themselves on our private lives and information. It crashes frequently and puts the work that I have done on it at risk as well as putting my personal information at risk to every bopper-hacker out there with access to the internet. HOWEVER, if Linux is going to compete for the general desktop market it MUST provide a stable platform that allows people to fix problems in their systems without being presented with an incomprehensible list of alphabet soup gibberish that effectively re-installs their entire system using cryptic tools that they never heard of and do not care about. So, to the fine folks who wrote Quanta+, my deepest thanks for a great tool. But a word of advice if they want to make it a broadly used tool.... stop upgrading it by using the latest, greatest, whiz-bangedest new fangledest GTK/KDE/kernel/ features on every dang release! Write the darn thing to use a stable platform that will be around for a while. Write it to use straight X-11R6 or something! More work? You bet! But once a mainstream user finds a bug in their tool and then finds that the fix involves six pages of unintelligible gibberish that puts their entire system in danger...... they will simply dump the app in the trash and look for a different app. I did. I have looked at Bluefish and some others. They do not compare well to Quanta+. Yikes, I have even considered just going back to typing my HTML into gvim and uploading with gftp! Sorry if I wrote a book-long rant. But I really like my Linux and I would like to see it become a bit more user-friendly for people who do not understand the complex inner-workings of the system. The mass market desktop is totally out of reach for Linux systems because of these issues. I am now going back into Lurk Mode with my Nomex underwear on. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

I asked this question a long time ago, and I came up with a workaround, which is to edit the project file and manually update the timestamps. But I am getting tired of editing project files just to get the timestamps correct. This is turning into a showstopper because the feature has no utility if I must always go in and update upload times manually. It would be easier to just write down the file names and then upload manually using ftp, which is the way I used to do this. So I am posting the question again. The problem is that after I upload a project to the web, the upload times are not updated in the project file, so the next upload wants to upload all of those files again......... and again........ and again! Is there something else that I need to do to make this work? The Save Project menu item is grayed out, so I cannot force a save. I have tried clicking the Update All button in the Update dialog, and it deselects the files, but it does not update the project file. I have tried closing all of the open .html files before closing Quanta, but that does not help. I have tried closing the project before exiting Quanta in an attempt to force a save. No good. I have opened up the permissions on the project file completely. Nothing. Does anybody know of a way to fix this, or perhaps there is another tool that I can use for my projects. This is just too frustrating. I spend a *lot* of time editing pages for the web, and I need a tool that works. Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

One final word on this topic before I leave it. Inkscape seems to work fine. It is just what I was looking for. The GUI is a lot easier to use than Sodipodi, and the program is constantly being improved, whereas Sodipodi appears to be kinda stuck...... and Inkscape is real Open Source. I may be back later to open up a new topic on updating my GTK to 2.4 so that I can update to version 0.40 of inkscape. But for now I am going with what I have. Thanks again to all the great folks on this board for pointing me to the right places. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

WOO HOO! I have inkscape running! I did some research on libsigc and found the dependencies for ver 1.2.5, which are: Requires * /sbin/ldconfig * /sbin/ldconfig * libc.so.6 * libgcc_s.so.1 * libm.so.6 * libstdc++.so.5 This is from http://at.rpmfind.net/z1/opsys/linux/RPM/m...-5mdk.i586.html Since this list is short, I looked for all of these libraries in /lib and /usr/lib. The were all there already, so I took a chance and installed libsigc++1.2_5-1.2.5-5mdk.i586.rpm That went just fine, so I then installed inkscape-0.39-1.mdk91.i586.rpm, which also seems to have gone fine. That was the highest level rev. that I found that was complaining only about libsigc. And now inkscape runs. Thanks to all for the help. I don't know what I would do without this board. The tool looks very much like sodipodi so far, so I will go try it out and see if I can work it better. Thanks again. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~ P.S. ( I suppose I ought to make sure that my system will still reboot before I celebrate...... Last time I messed with the system, I celebrated prematurely and my system was actually so broken that it wouldn't reboot..... :o )

I went out to sourceforge.net and looked up inkscape to see what rpm's are there. I downloaded some of the different versions, and tried to install. Here is a list of the packages that I downloaded and what I got for dependencies: Is there an easy way to resolve these? It seems that the versions that are packaged for mdk91 are still missing an upgrade of libsigc. I have libsigc-1.0.so.0.0.0 in /usr/lib. Is this related to libsigc++? Any ideas? I am confused. Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do not mean to rag on sodipodi. For the most part it seems to work OK, the problem being that I just don't know how to work it. I have been designing and programming GUI's for industrial equipment for 20 years, and it is still true that the manual is half of the job. No matter how elegant the GUI is, people need some guidance on how to use it. It is not possible to create a totally self-evident user interface. That said, I give a huge thanks to the folks who write these applications and make them available for us to use. I also extend a suggetion that the FM is still WAY important. If I could write such a thing, I would give it a go. However........ I went out to tldp.org once to see if I could help by writing manuals. I could not figure out all the technology that they require in order to write the FM.......... I was totally lost in the alphabet soup! :o I also would need to know how to work the program if I were to write the manual on how to work the program.......... which would require that I have a manual to figure it all out............... :D So, thanks to all for the suggestions. My search goes on in multiple directions. xfig is new to me. I will go research. I downloaded the static inkscape RPM and will see where that goes. I did not realize that people did static links any more. What a concept! A whole program included in the executable! Next thing you know we will be writing programs that are small enough to fit into RAM. As for the urpmi sources, I have not updated mine to look at the online sources. That is because I just recently got broadband and I have not found the time to go do that. When I was on dialup, there was no way that I would send this thing to look out on the net for updates and programs. It could easily cost me the second half of my life if it ever found anything and tried to download it. So, my sources are still stuck on the CD's I did go out to the recommended sites, official, contrib, and plf and found nothing about inkscape there..... perhaps I was not looking in the right places. plf seems to have disappeared. Well, I wrote a book again. Thanks to all for the help. This board is the best. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

OK I am figuring some of this sodipodi stuff out. My gradients went away because I had no objects selected. Duh. When I select an object, the gradient for that object shows up in the dialog. Yay. I have the gradient Apply to: field set to Selected Objects because I want to apply gradients to individual objects after they have been drawn. There is a trick to changing the colors in the gradient for a selected object though. The color chooser is posted from the Fill Settings box to allow changing the colors of the gradient. Once that has been done, it is necessary to erase the color chooser prior to selecting a new object. If you don't do that, it remains stuck on the previous object. It is not necessary to erase the Fill Settings dialog. That just follows whichever object is selected. The color chooser must be invoked again for each selection. This is inconsistent behavior, but that is what it does. Somebody must have gone through this before and figured out how the program works. It will take me two lifetimes to try all the combinations of button clicks and menus to reverse engineer the program. I will continue to look for a buildable version of inkscape to try it out. Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, I have to take some of it back. I just ran Sodipodi again, and I must have clicked a magic sequence or something (I don't know what it was) and the gradients came back. This is the strangest tool. Is there a user manual for this thing anywhere? I also took a look at the tons of inkscape RPM's and did not find one that I dare to install. Most are for 10.0 and above. The search goes on. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the pointers. I did find RPM's for inkscape, but I have had lousy luck installing just any old RPM's on my 9.1. It usually drops me right into Dependency Hell. So I was looking for something that was built for the tools that exist on 9.1. I am guessing that if I don't have the right stuff to compile inkscape 0.40, I probably don't have the right stuff to install it either. So, the question is, how far back do I go to find one that will work? Maybe I will just download source tarballs until I find one that will configure on my system. I will poke around and see if I can get any of this to work. Thanks again. Banjo (_)=='=~

I am looking for a good vector drawing program to use on my Mandy 9.1 I have Sodipodi, but this time I think it has pushed me over the edge. There are NO documents on how to use Sodipodi, so I am left with the trial and error method for everything. Whilst trying stuff, I hit the Delete key, and all the gradient tools went away in the Fill Settings dialog. Hunh? The dialog box is trashed. I rebooted Sodipodi, but it remains trashed. I deleted my .sodipodi to reinit, and it remains trashed. I suppose I can get it back with a re-install. But then I am still stuck with a tool that I cannot figure out. Truth be told, sodipodi has one of the most difficult user interfaces I have ever run across. Coupled with NO documentation and bizarro side effects, I have just about given up on it. I cannot make this tool do anything useful after months of trying. Enter inkscape. Looks interesting, so I downloaded the source. I ran configure and it bails with So I am stuck again. I cannot compile the program and have no idea what it would take to add the required development bits. Any clues? Am I close, or is this going to explode into a complete OS upgrade? I looked for a 9.1 RPM for inkscape, but found nothing in the official release, and nothing in contrib and PLF appears to be down. Is there ANYTHING out there that actually works, has some minimal user docs and can be installed on Mandy 9.1? This is really frustrating. Thanks for the help. Banjo (_)=='=~

I thought that I would add a followup message to this topic in case anybody is interested in the results I have had. Is anybody else trying to do this? I installed Kover, and it seemed to do what I wanted, but when I tried to print the insert, I ran into problems. As long as it had no images it would print OK, but as soon as I put an image on the page, the program would just hang, and the printer flashed its error light and quit. I need to be able to print images. I tried to make a template in OpenOffice to make the booklet, and that worked OK except for the images. Evidently, it is not possible to drop an image into a drawing in OOo...?? At least I could not figure out a way to do it. So that didn't work. I finally just made a graphical template using The GIMP. I set it up with a dot pitch of 144 dpi and a size of 1368 X 684 so that it would print in the correct size of 9.5 X 4.75 inches. Since this is The GIMP, I am able to have my way with the images and text, so the sky is the limit. I really need that flexibility to make creative covers. This method has worked out really well so far. Creating the tray-card is a bit more difficult though, and adding the text to it using The GIMP would be tedious. I looked at cdlabelgen, but the output of it seems a bit restrictive in the formatting department. So I kept looking. I found another perl script, called "splice" which I got from here: http://www.scholnick.net/splice/ That seems to work OK, and it has a nice output. It doesn't put any boxes or titles on the traycard, and it prints nicely on the spines. I have used that program with good effect. So I am going to make the booklet inserts using my GIMP template, but I may keep looking at alternatives for the traycard piece. That is all so far. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Banjo (_)=='=~

Just a quick followup for anyone who may be watching this topic. I found kover on the Mandy 9.1 distro CD's and installed it. It appears to do what I need. I can even put a picture on the front cover. I have not tried to print yet since my printer is out of toner right now, but I will give it a go later. Thanks to all for the help. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the pointers. I will go check them out. Banjo (_)=='=~

I am looking for some open source software that will run on my Mandy 9.1 to create and print inserts for Audio CD's in jewel cases. Google has not turned up anything so far. Anybody have any favorites? Has anybody used The GIMP for this? Templates for OpenOffice? Thanks in advance. Banjo (_)=='=~