[oclug] Evolution problem

[Michael P. Soulier]

On 15/06/03 David F. Skoll did speaketh:

> I agree with you.  In fact, my next Monitor article is all about my
> frustration with RH9 and my decision to switch to Gentoo on my laptop.
> I wanted to do something extremely simple, which under RH9 meant
> editing huge chunks of XML (after learning what the hell everything
> meant first), and under Gentoo meant changing one line in a simple
> self-documenting text file.

    I look forward to reading that article. Let us know when it's out. 

    You actually don't have to hack the gconf files directly, you can
use gconf-editor (ie. regedit in disguise). Personally, I'm finding the
registry idea highly overrated. M$ only moved to it because their .ini
files were getting too big and DOS couldn't handle reading them anymore.
Otherwise, the registry probably wouldn't exist. 
    I recently set up qmail on two boxes, and I was amazed at how
incredibly simple it is to configure. Nothing but pure ascii text.
Setting up smarthosting with sendmail and exim takes a deeper
understanding of their cryptic configuration files. I did it in qmail
like so:
    echo :mail.digitaltorque.ca > /var/qmail/control/smtproutes

    done. Fsck the registry.

> I can't think of a GNOME or KDE application that I would really miss.
> I use The Gimp, but that's a Gtk+ application, not really a Gnome app.
> I use knode to read news, but could do without it if I had to.  The killer
> apps for me are Emacs, Mozilla, Pine and LaTeX.

    For me, Vim, Mozilla, Mutt, ssh, xterm. I also need xmms for coding
music, and I sometimes write LaTeX or DocBook documentation, but it's
typically embedded POD (Perl) or docstrings (Python). I've been jumping
back and forth between IceWM and Blackbox as my window-manager, with
lots of xterms. The occasional toy like gkrellm is nice, and if I need a
file mangler, gentoo is nice, or even Emacs' dired mode, but 99% of the
time, bash is just fine. 

> Finally, I agree that GNOME and KDE are trying to imitate M$ Windoze
> and that it's probably not a good idea.  Roaring Penguin has two
> full-time sales/marketing people.  They're computer-literate, but had
> only ever used Windoze.  They adapted just fine to the default RH8/RH9
> setup---it took no retraining whatsoever.  Interestingly, I had to
> train them to demo our app on Solaris, which uses CDE.  That's very
> different from Windoze/GNOME/KDE, and yet it took them about two
> minutes to catch on.
> 
> So I think a lot of people vastly overrate how difficult it is to switch
> from Windoze to Linux.  They vastly overrate the importance of a "rich"
> (i.e., Windoze-like) desktop, and vastly underrate the intelligence
> and adaptability of the average computer user.

    Hmm. You're describing two different situations though. In your
case, you're handing a different environment to individuals unlikely to
argue, since you're the boss. They accept it because they have to, and
then are pleasently surprised when they have no troubles with it. 
    In the other case, you're trying to urge the clueless masses to try
something different by telling them that the transition time will be
quite short since it will be familiar to them. We end up emulating what
we hate to try to convert people. It's far from an ideal situation, but
the world is grey, not black and white. I don't like copying M$, but I
understand why it's being done. 
    What I vehemently object to is removing the ability to customize.
Sawfish was very simple and useful out of the box, and most people would
leave it that way. I'm not most people. I learned the rep API and
starting keeping my own body of code in my .sawfishrc of customizations,
just for me. Leaving in the ability to do that doesn't hurt anyone, it
only helps. And yet, Metacity is absolutely useless because it can't be
customized. Hell, you can't even customize the Gnome menu on RH8. Back
to IceWM I go, where I can customize damn near everything. Losing
Sawfish in Gnome was the dumbest decision the Gnome camp has ever made,
IMHO. 

    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at digitaltorque.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort."  -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
HTML Email Considered Harmful: http://expita.com/nomime.html
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