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Mandriva 2006 Package Manager - Awful


acegap
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One would think that the name MandrivaUsers would be enough.

 

I'm still not certain what the poster is complaining about. Is the poster complaining that when the Fax utility (for example) is removed, it removes many other pkgs that it was a dependency of that the poster wanted to keep?

 

Edit: I just took a look at the poster's other posts in the forums. He is not the troll it appears from this topic (y'all should look).

  • [1] He has a USB Speedtouch modem (that's enough to frustrate Ghandi).
    [2] A few answers to his questions were not 'newbie-ized'.
    [3] He was relatively friendly and grateful in the posts I read.

BTW: The Alcatel Speedtouch is a pain in the ***. Not really Mandriva's fault...Alcatel's.

Konqueror shows large icons by default, because Mandriva's approach (and KDE's) is to be newbie-friendly. Icons == more intuitive than text in their opinion.

(These are comments from me for his other posts...)

Edited by Steve Scrimpshire
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why do you like to talk about people in the third person when they are obviously going to be reading this thread, stevie boy? you can at least call him by his name instead of referring to him as "poster" :P

 

I think the issue is that there's no easy means by which to remove a "group" of programs, and seeing a list of "to remove this you have to remove these" with a bunch of packages that you don't know what they are can be somewhat...frustrating? intimidating? scary? One of those, anyways. I know when I first started using Mandriva I was afraid to remove packages at times because I didn't know what kind of craziness/headaches would ensue. Hell, sometimes I still don't know :P

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Edit: I just took a look at the poster's other posts in the forums. He is not the troll it appears from this topic (y'all should look).

 

[1] He has a USB Speedtouch modem (that's enough to frustrate Ghandi).

[2] A few answers to his questions were not 'newbie-ized'.

[3] He was relatively friendly and grateful in the posts I read.

 

You'd have to agree his initial post in this thread can be seen to border trolling based on the comments - they weren't asking for help like his previous posts.

 

We're talking about *this* thread, not his previous ones ;)

 

And yeah, dependencies are a pain, but they are there to stop your system from breaking. Although some I'm sure can be removed safely without causing any probs. I've never bothered to remove any of the fax stuff. It's probably so small in size anyway, it wouldn't make much difference removing it.

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Edit: I just took a look at the poster's other posts in the forums. He is not the troll it appears from this topic (y'all should look).

 

hi steve,

 

i took your advice and read through some of his other posts. you're right. he seems like a nice enough guy. he's just frustrated. that's fair enough.

 

acegap, hopefully you'll keep with linux since it seems like you have the desire and ability to do things with linux. one unfortunate complication to open source is that the people writing the software are often very technologically advanced. this sometimes skews the concept of "easy to use".

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it really is a pretty common mistake that this is a board for the developers of mandriva. maybe there should be some disclaimer (separate from user agreements) when people sign up for the board that "WE ARE NOT THE MAKERS/DISTRIBUTORS OF MANDRIVA LINUX.....'.

 

this common mistake however leads people to vent about frustrations. although i don't condone the attitude , i understand it.

Maybe we should change the banner text to something like this: Mandrivausers.org - The UNOFFICIAL Mandriva support forum where our users feel @ /home

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[OT]

BTW: The Alcatel Speedtouch is a pain in the ***. Not really Mandriva's fault...Alcatel's
- It's not hard, it's as easy as 1,2,3 ... I may have to start a crusade :P

[Quake2 Quote] Make it stop, make it stop[/Quake2 Quote] :wall: [/OT]

 

 

 

I don't think he is a troll, as JonEberger said, he is just frustrated, and that is understandable, although Mandriva/Linux may have come a long way in the 'user friendly' stakes, it is still quite a culture shock for a person coming from Windows. The dependency thing can be quite confronting when you first see it, all you seemingly want to do is just remove a simple program, and you see a mile long list of other things that are going to be removed, 'Hey, I just wanted to uninstall blabla, not remove the entire OS :unsure: '

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why do you like to talk about people in the third person when they are obviously going to be reading this thread, stevie boy? you can at least call him by his name instead of referring to him as "poster"

 

Well, because, when I started typing, the name 'acegap' seemed pretty gender-neutral to me. I began to use 'he' and 'his' only when absolutely necessary in my post (if you notice). I've made the mistake of assuming gender before...only to be wrong. :P

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Hi. i'm back lol. Very nice of you guy's to be so concerned...

 

Referring to the other posts i should definitely refer you to this one about the SpeedTouch Modem where the whole problem (three or four days or so.. it's all a blur lol) hinged around the incorrect use of ONE word. A Classic Lesson in how to be of use or how to be of use/hindrance or even possible terminal hindrance. I only struck on the solution/situation by accident in another thread after I had given up on it completely: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=34756

 

Anyway, I had another crack at re-installation this morning. I unticked what I didn't want installed, ticked a few more that looked nice, managed to save the installation configuration to a .pl file on a zip drive OK and I'm back up and running with a KDE desktop!

 

I can't believe I'm still here lol.

 

 

Maybe we should change the banner text to something like this: Mandrivausers.org - The UNOFFICIAL Mandriva support forum where our users feel @ /home

Whooa Dexter - who said I wasn't feeling at home? I didn't even think I was on the track of the "Developers" like someone else was saying. Just general frustration for sure...

 

What nobody has mentioned though is that the gui for the System Configuration Console - hardware, software, security, internet, etc (i'm on my Windows machine at the moment, s'cuse) - is very, very nice...

..It seems obvious to me that it is probably just a matter of time before you will be able to click on the brand new 'Install New Packages' button and are confronted with an equally very, very, nice 'Install New Packages' gui that has been freshly integrated into the System Configuration Console. I hope I'm right.

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What nobody has mentioned though is that the gui for the System Configuration Console - hardware, software, security, internet, etc (i'm on my Windows machine at the moment, s'cuse) - is very, very nice...

..It seems obvious to me that it is probably just a matter of time before you will be able to click on the brand new 'Install New Packages' button and are confronted with an equally very, very, nice 'Install New Packages' gui that has been freshly integrated into the System Configuration Console. I hope I'm right.

If you used Mandrake/Mandriva or any other Linux distro before, you could have noticed that (a) the KDE menu has changed quite substantially and has become more newbie friendly; (b) Distros modify the standard KDE menu the way they see appropriate. If I am not mistaken, Mandrake/driva does offer (or used to offer) an option of using a simplified version of the KDE menu, which has features you mention (though I am not certain it goes as far as package selection).

 

Would it be a good thing if KDE or Mandriva one day decide to do things Windows way? I strongly disagree. If you prefer using Windows, that's fine, but you should not expect KDE/Mandriva to be like Windows. If you ever had to fix a broken system or tried to install a non-Mandriva/non-RPM software, you would have appreciated the transparency of linux installation, and this is when all those package dependencies start making sense.

 

In regard to the simplicity and friendliness of Windows, you should not mistake selecting packages behind the scene for a more robust package selection/installation/removal. If you ever installed a Windows game you would notice a pop up window saying that you needed DirectX or something. Did you ever think, why did those messages appear "Blahblah.dll has been found on your computer. Skip/Overwrite?" How do you know the right answer? And when you uninstall something, in 99% cases you would see a message "BlahBlah has been uninstalled, some components could not be removed". Did you ever try removing leftovers from the registry? Do you call this a nice GUI for software removal? If you use SpyBot (and you should on a routine basis), how do you tell false positives from the spyware? The list can go on...

 

Let me just finish by quoting the famous character "Ogres are not like cakes, ogres are like onions!". You can like cakes or onions, or both, take your pick.

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