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Worst Linux Annoyances?
greenrd writes "Ever spent hours trying (and failing) to get a printer driver to work on Linux? Struggled to configure something ever-so-slightly out-of-the-ordinary? What have been your biggest annoyances when using Linux? Three O'Reilly authors are compiling a book on Linux annoyances - and their suggested solutions - and they've started a mailing list here. I can't help but think, though, that such a book will be dated quite quickly. Sure, some problems do languish unfixed for years - but equally, I suspect many of the problems will be fixed before, or soon after, the book's publication date. Still, increased visibility might motivate developers to create fixes or workarounds for some of the problems, so maybe this is an ideal opportunity to get your pet peeve finally addressed!"
"lsof /mountpoint/" will show you exactly what file descriptors are open, and allow you to easily terminate them by PID. lsof has a plethora of options, check out the man page, I'm sure you'll find it remarkably helpful.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Configuring X is the worst thing with Linux PERIOD.
.. first post? /m
While accustomed users can get it to work - newbies are often left stranded before they even get to try out Linux. A lot of people really want to try Linux but they never get past the X config.
Just think of the improvements in general usability over the last few years (gnome/kde etc.) and compare that to how XFree86 has been evolving.
This is probably going to trigger comments such as: why dont you contribute then?? - well:
1. Lack of time
2. Are contributions actually welcome? we read a lot of stuff now and again about how the XFree86 crowd are blocking patches, rumours of forking etc. When people are forced to fork just to get excellent patches in theres something wrong.
Just my 2c.. oh and
DVD support is the only reason I keep a Windows partition.
ogle, xine, and mplayer.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms. Download the Synaptic graphical interface for it once you've got it all set up and configured properly. That should be the last annoying install of almost any package I could imagine you running. These two applications together have solved the dependency/installation issue for me completely, and it was my biggest Linux annoyance too.
Rpm with apt is just as good as deb with apt. Everyone seems to be very confused about this issue, and tries to compare apt against rpm as if that somehow makes any sense. It doesn't. Apt works with both rpm and deb, and works very well with them. If you are using redhat and like it there is no reason to switch to something else just to get a dependancy checking package manager, just hit freshrpms.net and get apt.
Finkployd
Xine is great. Lets you skip sections (FBI warning at the beginning, etc.) that set-top and Windows often won't.
Red Hat: up2date
Mandrake: urpmi
Debian: apt-get
Gentoo: emerge
SuSE: yast2
Man, the tools are there, learn how to use them. Dependency Hell is a thing (almost...) of the past.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
use the lazy switch. it will let you umount a device even if there are processes using it. works pretty good for me.
my biggest annoyance is linux's abismal printer support/configuration. i still can't use my work's HP Color Laserjet 4550N.
- Inconsistency in the administration tools,
including dropping the linuxconf tool for the less functional controlpanel.
- Failure to include any updates to Netscape.
- Choosing an immature unrealeased beta gcc version for a production release.
- Breaking the NFS client so that acccess times
became 100X slower (way to go guys, great job not testing there!).
- Breaking the install so that an upgrade hosed my Athlon box at home (motivating a quick run to Best Buy to get SuSE, and I've never looked back).
- Numerous Kernel bugs induced during "upgrades" which I need to accept to close security holes. I had 6 months of hell due to a Kernel bug which caused my server to give up the ghost without a cry for help. Sure I blamed it on hardware at first, since I had 1 year of uptime, but then I realized that their updates just didn't cut it, and they finally fixed it this June.
SuSE has some glitches too, in particularYou could use zsh. This is one of the reasons I love it, it's great completion system. You can do: rpm -Uvh [TAB] and only .rpm will complete
tar xjf [TAB] and only .tar.bz2 or .tbz2 are completed.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
It's really more complicated than this, but in simple terms:
The OS constantly monitored the drives (I never had a CD-ROM for my Amiga, so this example is of the floppy) for media. When the system detected that a disk had been inserted, it would automaticaly mount the floppy. When you hit the eject button, the Floppy would automaticaly unmount. A side effect of this was that the floppy drives were always making a soft "click" sound every few seconds. You got used to it.
That's pretty much all there is to it.
Also, I haven't had a real Amiga in a long time, so take this with a grain of salt.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Middle-click paste has been a standard part of X11 for ages, and it's awesome. It drives me crazy to have to hit other buttons or right click and scroll down to copy and paste crap in Windows. This is a major reason I find doing anything productive on Windows such a huge pain in the ass.
WinZIP is an application suite that handles many compression formats.
.gz files, imagine that. WinZIP is BIG.
GZIP is a single compression format. It can only handle gzipped files (duh!). If it handled more, it wouldn't be a tiny utility, and that wouldn't be very unix-like, would it? GZIP needs to stay small because it's used in tiny places like initial RAM disks and boot floppies.
WinZIP actually uses the library in gzip to handle
Search freshmeat for archiving utilities (with names that often sound like linzip or similar). These are what you are really looking for. Also note that later Nautulis (gnome-vfs) and Konqueror release can browse into many types of archives as if they were folders.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"RTFM. If you don't like it go use windows."
No! I told him to use graphical desktop apps. Nowhere did I even mentioned Windows.
Graphical archiving apps like File Roller and KArchive detect the file format automatically. Those are the apps you should be using, not commandline apps.
Amiga could do this for floppies. The IBM PC floppy drives were never really capable of reacting when you inserted a floppy.. you had to actually run a program to go and look to see if a floppy was inserted.
On the Amiga, individal floppies were named, and whenever any program wanted something off of a specific floppy, you could put the floppy in any drive attached to the system, and the OS would notice it, read it's label, and any programs wantingg to read that disk could then proceed without further user intervention.
Made floppies a lot more manageable, back in the Amiga 1000 days when hard drives for the Amiga were rare indeed.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
You can give a look at the automount kernel feature. Basically it keeps listening to a special directory (say, /Mount/CD-ROM), and when it's accessed, any media is tryied to be mounted. When the user ejects the media or leaves the media's directory, it just unmount it and that's fine (given that there isn't any application executing something on the mounted media).
I didn't read the code yet, but this is the basic idea behind it. I think it makes use of a few userspace daemons to aid on directory detection ().
There's a good sample on how to do something similar (in userland) at linux/Documentation/dnotify.txt.
Rpm with apt is just as good as deb with apt.
BZZT. Wrong. Debian packages have recommends, suggests, and a whole host of things that RPMs don't, which makes dependency resolution easier.
Not to mention the strict policy debian has wrt to packaging... which is probably the biggest reason debs are easier to manage than rpms.
The numerous folks who insist that Linux is the cure-all and be-all for all computer woes.