Re: [Pan-users] Well, 112 packages later, Gnome works . . mostly :)

[Duncan]

On Tue 07 Jan 2003 13:35, Mark Smitka posted as excerpted below:
> Apologies for the off topic nature of the post, but I thought it worth
> mentioning that following my initial joy after upgrading to GTK 2.2, I
> spent about 72 hours trying to completely restore *all* of Gnome's
> functionality. I'm not sure why, as I really never used the Gnome desktop
> anyway, but heck, what's more fun than fixing something you broke for no
> good reason?

MAN does that sound familiar!  I haven't tried gtk 2.2 yet, as I'm sticking 
with Mandrake Cooker on that for now, and it's not that far out (2.0.5 
currently), but the beta Mandrake Cooker tends to "cook the Mandrake" on 
occasion itself, requiring all sorts of manipulations to get things working 
again.  The latest was when I installed their XFree86 4.2.99.3 snapshot and 
lost most of my KDE (itself now 3.1RC6, so not quite release) hotkeys, 
because they changed support for my cordless keyboard and I lost all the 
extra internet and media key functionality again, as well as having the WIN 
key now only detected as F13.

The MOST fun, however, was how I ended up learning sed -- by upgrading to a 
new devfs version that killed access to all but my root partition, and took 
all my usual editors including VIM with it at the same time.  (I since 
learned that Mdk has a vim-minimal executable designed to run w/o /usr, but 
didn't know it at the time, and their regular vim requires /usr for its perl 
and python support.)  I could have resorted to the rescue/install CD, but 
remembered reading about sed in the back of my trusty Arabian (Linux in a 
Nutshell), and decided it was about time I actually figured out how to use 
it!  It turned out the new devfsd.conf file attempted to load a new security 
module which wasn't in the dependencies, and therefore hadn't bee installed, 
since it was an upgrade, not a new install.  I commented it out, and changed 
fstab to load critical partitions by long native kernel name, rather than 
short /dev/hda0 type name, in case it ever happened again, but it took me a 
couple days of worry and care to figure it all out and get it working again, 
so I could d/l the missing module and uncomment that reference again.

You are absolutely right, tho, about the fun and challenge of fixing something 
you broke for no good reason.  I'd have grown tired of computers many years 
ago, if it weren't for that, as they'd be as boring as any other generally 
reliable device, that never breaks because it doesn't give you the ability to 
tweak it into breaking!  <g>  That's the thrill of computers that's kept me 
with them all these years!

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin