Linux Rant
Last night I got really frustrated getting some basic functionality out of a new notebook for my friend. I am sitting here, configuring and working around stuff, while a beautiful Sunday is outside the windows.
Apart from the typical ‘won’t suspend’, ‘oh that’s a wonky pulse audio daemon’, ‘oh you need to install these fishy codecs’, ‘oh CUPS hates people’, ‘yea gstreamer doesn’t do DVD menus’ I had two extra ones that brought me to my knees.
For some reason Brasero, now the default audio CD burner used by Banshee insists on using the reverse order of the tracks to burn them and gives no obvious way to change this. This is a stupid trivial issue, hardly something a maintainer would mark as a showstopper in bugzilla, yet makes the whole toolchain useless for my friend.
The other grief was her generic mp3 player. We don’t really have the infrastructure to allow huge amounts of people to contribute information about their devices to have other people have theirs work out of the box or have data to make a good buy decision.
HAL and the FDI description files is a great technology. But I have been very frustrated last night to see my friend’s generic el cheapo mp3 player not supported only because a description file was missing. A generic usb storage device and I coudln’t see it in Banshee, nor could I just drag and drop files onto a Nautilus window (since when did Banshee lose this capability?). Sadly not even getting the FDI clobbed up didn’t end my horror.
I would so love to see a social site around this, similar to Ohloh. Earning kudos for providing FDI files for all the devices I have. Creating a timeline of what devices I have owned over the years. Seeing what devices my friends use and their Linux support status. Submitting custom icons for specific devices (seeing all the great icons in gnome-icon-theme-extras rot without being used makes me sad).
August 31st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Open source projects lack judgement of what is important enough to be a show stopper. Then they ship constantly 0.1 quality software as 1.0, when not even the very basics are functioning…
August 31st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
GNOME, software that “just” works….
August 31st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Definitely things must change… Developers must start hear users and their needs and they need to stop ignoring importat to users bugs.
I’m frustrated, when I need to configure X, Samba, CUPS or pm-utils…
August 31st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think the ideal would be some way to automatically spread configuration files.
So there would be two parts:
1. when you plug in your iDiddlyBopPlayer, automatically connect to a central server and look for relevant configuration files
2. a simple way to upload configuration files. E.g. suppose you connect an unknown player, and maybe copy and paste a conffile, or even if it worked out of the box – a dialog pops up saying “upload configuration for others to use?” and you can hit “yes, this works for me” or “no, not working yet”.
This is just a dream, of course, and there are existing ideas in the same space (KHotNewStuff, Popcon….) but maybe there is room to do something here… drop me a line if you want.
August 31st, 2008 at 1:36 pm
The workaround for this problem with IDs in MP3 players in Banshee and Rhythmbox has always been to add the .is_audio_player file to the device’s file system and edit it to look like this:
audio_folders=music/,Record/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg
BTW, RB doesn’t have the “reverse order” problem. It’s the default in Gnome. I didn’t see you say what distro you were using. That would be a good thing to add to this rant. If it’s Ubuntu 8.04, then I feel your pain. Nasty stuff, that.
But I like the ID reporting concept. Ask Launchpad to add it to people’s profile page. They can then aggregate the data.
August 31st, 2008 at 1:51 pm
This is openSUSE 11.0. Sadly the .is_audio_player trick doesn’t seem to work :/ Edit — actually it DOES, thank you.
August 31st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Try putting Esata or firewire cards in the express34/54 slot. They aren’t seen and loaded, and if your lucky, with out a lot of fooling around.
August 31st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Hi Jakub,
Can you point me into the direction of a site containing information on FDI files? I’d love to contribute the devices I have. Is there any ‘easy’ way to do this? Or is it just editing the XML files?
Thanks.
August 31st, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Alternatively, distros could consider actually updating the hal-info package. (Not to mention all the other ones.)
August 31st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Here’s the bugzilla bug for Brasero
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547874
August 31st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
sander: I wish. If a similar device exists, you can copy and paste from existing fdi files in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information. Also handy is a tool called lshal. Run it before attaching the device, then after and run diff between the two outputs to get all the needed info about the device.
The bits to support the device in question look like the patch attached to bug #17380.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Jakub, you’re an artist.
Why need you torture yourself using Linux, the eternal failure of an operation system?
Use a Mac or Windows. Linux is slow, buggy, insecure, and lacks most application software needed for almost any task. Do yourself a favor, and find a hobby that doesn’t require head banging.
Unless that’s your thing, but then, nobody’s perfect.
Cheers.
LH supporter.
August 31st, 2008 at 9:33 pm
> Linux is slow, buggy, insecure, and lacks most application software needed for almost any task
Nah, funny. People are so too and we don’t change them.
August 31st, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Well yes it did piss me off today, but at the end of the day my frustration will likely help fix those issues. It’s not like I didn’t have my share of frustration with Windows os OSX…
September 1st, 2008 at 3:58 am
Funny, my partner just bought a Windows laptop; we’ve spent the last three hours uninstalling useless crap, installing Windows updates, AVG, AdAware, Spybot, Opera, codecs (yep, Windows doesn’t come with any either), Flash…
Anyhoo, that’s by the by. The sad thing here is that a lot of this is stuff manufacturers should be doing. No-one should *need* to try and design a social site around providing hardware information (um, good luck with that) because the bleeding manufacturers should do it when they manufacture the thing. This is the only sane way. Any way which relies on end users to provide the information is broken and will therefore inevitably look absurd.
Most of your other problems could easily have been solved by installing Mandriva instead.
(/troll)
September 1st, 2008 at 10:49 am
gstreamer cvs can now do dvd menus. After next distro update its hopefully in you desktop.
September 1st, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Yeah and two releases later (in some 2+ years or so) gstreamer will also do deinterlacing so you can actually watch the dvd as well *smirk*
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
What did you expect? You’re a Linux user, you should be used to brokenness by now. If you expect thjngs to work, don’t use Linux. That’s what the world does, by the way.
September 4th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Hey dick, why don’t you stop whining and get a life?
September 6th, 2008 at 1:13 am
Use Windows. Works for me(tm)
September 8th, 2008 at 4:49 am
I wonder how many time has been wasted (yes: wasted) in re-inventing the wheel and hot watter for Linux on the desktop. Linux doesn’t offer ground-braking new software, the vast majority are copies from software which actually works.
This is where the difference in price is: in one OS you pay for work done for you, in Linux you get it for free but spend hours of free time to get it going. Free time isn’t free btw, it’s pretty valuable.