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June 28, 2001 |
From: Florian Cramer <paragram@gmx.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: "On the Desktop" Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 17:14:58 +0200 Since I was the very first person to complain about your section "On the Desktop", I owe you a note that this opinion has changed. In the last few weeks, the column has improved significantly and now is on par with the rest of LWN. Great job, and please continue the good work! Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3D0DACA2 | ||
From: Rob Funk <rfunk@funknet.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Kudos - "On The Desktop" fits now Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 14:07:20 -0400 A few weeks ago I wrote in to say that the "On The Desktop" section didn't fit with the style of the rest of LWN. Then, every week since I wrote that (starting the week my letter was published), I have noticed a gradual improvement. Finally, this week I realized that the transformation is complete. I read through the whole issue of LWN, got to the letters about the dekstop section, and thought "oh yeah, I didn't notice that section this time." I checked my browser's history and went back to that page; yes, I had read the page, and found it interesting (including the review of the XFree86 book). I just didn't notice anything out of the ordinary when I was reading it, as I had in previous editions. The style is now the same as the rest of LWN. So kudos to Michael J. Hammel for transforming "On The Desktop" into a true part of LWN! -- ==============================| "A microscope locked in on one point Rob Funk <rfunk@funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in" http://www.funknet.net/rfunk | -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind" | ||
From: Bret Mogilefsky <mogul-lwn@gelatinous.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: On the Desktop Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 00:43:27 -0700 This week's On the Desktop column is a huge improvement over what we were seeing a few weeks ago! Thank you for responding and bringing this section up to the high standards of the rest of LWN. Bret Mogilefsky | ||
From: Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Corel WPO2k/Linux instability Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 10:34:21 -0400 In reference to Dave Mallery's letter from June 14th, I feel we should place credit where credit is due for WPO2k's instability. WPO2k/Linux was buggy and unstable the day it was released. At the time, it would not install on several platforms (prompting eventual release of updated install scripts), crashed often, had features that simply didn't work and had innumerable problems of many sorts. It is unlikely that many of the problems that Dave is seeing are because he is using RHL7.1. The problems are probably similar to the problems that everyone else has been seeing since the app was released. Corel has provided minimal ongoing support to this suite since released, and doesn't look likely to provide any in the future. Currently, the most stable WPO2k/Linux is to be had by downloading and compiling the latest corelwine from http://opensource.corel.com, and modifying the startup scripts appropriately. While there are a few incompatibilities of WPO2k/Linux with current distributions, they're all fairly easy to work around. The real problems have been there all along. -- Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors! Great minds run in great circles. | ||
From: zooko@zooko.com To: letters@lwn.net Subject: shared library dependencies are a solved problem Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 09:40:12 -0700 Editor: I am surprised that LWN has not yet clued in that shared library dependencies are a solved problem. Appended is a transcript of me installing gnucash on my debian system. I simply typed `apt-get install gnucash', waited a few seconds while it figured out all of the dependencies and conflicts, answered "Yes" to the question of "It is okay to install or upgrade the following packages in order to install gnucash?", and then waited for a few minutes while it did so. By the way, it is *not* accurate to say that I am running "an unstable distribution". That would imply that my software has been recently updated. In fact, I haven't updated any of my base system software in months. Once you have `apt-get', the notion of "distributions" becomes fuzzy. I could have run the exact same apt-get command from a debian stable ("potato") system, with the same results, except that the list of needed upgrades would be longer. Now, one could object that it is inherently unstable to upgrade, for example, your `bonobo' shared library, but this is a *separate* problem! There are two problems: 1. I want to run gnucash 1.6 but I don't want to risk instability by upgrading the dependencies to the needed versions. 2. It is such a hassle trying to figure out which versions of which libraries to upgrade or install without conflicting with something else. The latter is a *solved* problem if you use `apt-get' (which currently means Debian, the Debian-derived products, and I think HelixCode->Ximian as well). And it does *not* require that you "upgrade to an unstable distribution" in order to use it. Regards, Zooko ------- begin appended bash transcript MAIN imp:/tmp$ sudo apt-get install gnucash Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following extra packages will be installed: bonobo gnome-libs-data guile-common guile1.4 guile1.4-slib libart2 libbonobo2 libdate-manip-perl libefs1 libfinance-quote-perl libgal7 libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libghttp1 libglade-gnome0 libgnome32 libgnomeprint-bin libgnomeprint-data libgnomeprint15 libgnomesupport0 libgnomeui32 libgnorba27 libgtkhtml-data libgtkhtml9 libguile9 libguppi11 libgwrapguile1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libmime-base64-perl libnet-perl liboaf0 liborbit0 libunicode0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libzvt2 oaf slib The following NEW packages will be installed: bonobo gnome-libs-data gnucash guile-common guile1.4 guile1.4-slib libart2 libbonobo2 libdate-manip-perl libefs1 libfinance-quote-perl libgal7 libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libghttp1 libglade-gnome0 libgnome32 libgnomeprint-bin libgnomeprint-data libgnomeprint15 libgnomesupport0 libgnomeui32 libgnorba27 libgtkhtml-data libgtkhtml9 libguile9 libguppi11 libgwrapguile1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libmime-base64-perl libnet-perl liboaf0 liborbit0 libunicode0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libzvt2 oaf slib 0 packages upgraded, 40 newly installed, 0 to remove and 157 not upgraded. Need to get 11.3MB of archives. After unpacking 37.8MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] ... | ||
From: Michael Price <mprice@atl.lmco.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: GnuCash 1.6 & library dependencies Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 10:33:23 -0400 I was a bit surprised to see an article at lwn.net concerning GnuCash 1.6 and the large number of libraries it requires. Anyone with Gnome 1.4 installed will have no trouble installing GnuCash 1.6. On my FreeBSD machine I already had every required library except one just by installing the gnome port. GnuCash 1.6 was trivial to install. While I agree that 65 libraries seems like a large number, this really wasn't as much of an issue as lwn.net reported it to be. For the most part the only people affected where those with old Linux installations who are afraid to install anything on their machine unless its in the "magical" rpm format. GnuCash is an excellent program and version 1.6 is feature rich and the product of a lot of work. Casting it in a negative light wasn't exactly what I'd call responsible journalism. -- Michael Price Distributed Processing Lab; Lockheed Martin Adv. Tech. Labs A&E 3W; 1 Federal Street; Camden, NJ 08102 856-338-4021, fax 856-338-4144 email: mprice@atl.lmco.com | ||
From: Ariel Faigon <ariel@yendor.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: .Net to support Linux? (ZDNet) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 17:37:19 -0700 Hi Friends, Haven't we learned Microsoft MO yet? Yes, they will do everything so people migrate from other platforms to theirs. Ask yourself not whether a MS development tool is available on Linux, but whether it is _targeted_ to Linux. i.e. can the produced code _run_ on Linux. And if it does, ask yourself whether it isn't trying to tie the higher-up layer into Microsoft-only .NET services or databases (like Hailstorm/Passport) etc. They are as transparent as air. Nothing has really changed except now they own the browser and are looking at "the next frontier" to dominate. -- Peace, Ariel Living a 100% Microsoft Free Lifestyle, and loving it Try it, maybe you'd like it too. | ||
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