See also: last week's Letters page.

Letters to the editor

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.