Re: [SLE] Epiphany issue

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To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 14:48:22 -0400

On Friday 07 October 2005 18:25, James Ogley wrote:
> > What have I done wrong. I want firefox to come up when I click a link
> > in evolution.
> > I do not want or like epiphany .
>
> What have you done wrong? You've monkeyed around without knowing what
> you're doing.
>
> Change your GNOME web browser to Firefox. Sorted.

How does one find out what one is doing, without monkeying
around?

Information about Linux stuff, on the web, doesn't seem to be
tagged for freshness, with expiry dates and applicability notes.
Just reading everything to be found on a topic, before doing
any monkeying has never done me much good... and I'm one
of those people with a need-to-read (I even re-read the label
on the cereal box if there's nothing else handy...). I've found
that wide reading means reading of lots of contradictory and
outdated stuff, along with stuff that might be valuable.
I do it, but these days only to get the general flavor of the
area that currently has me stymied, not for specific steps,
since following steps from two (or ten) contradictory HowTos
or extracted from 2002 Debian mailing lists (hey, if that's
what Google puts up, that's what I read) is a recipe for trouble
as well.

Whenever I start anything I haven't done before, I read
man pages and look for HowTos, but I invariably get into
trouble because - without experience - the multiple ways
to do anything in Linux don't sort themselves into neat
categories. Later, when somebody on the list helps me to
dig myself out, it usually involves backtracking, uninstalling
and deleting 47 things that I didn't need to do, but which
conflict with the one path that I've (or the coach) settled on.

I can short-circuit the process sometimes, by just jumping
in, getting in trouble, and then getting help to extract myself.
That approach at least saves me from reading dozens or
hundreds of pages that don't apply. :-)

On average, it takes me many weeks or months to sort
out any installation/configuration that doesn't accidentally
go perfectly the first time. Thus, if I start trying to do
things shortly after I install the latest SuSE, then I may
actually have time to get to a resolution on some little
project. If I start a couple or three months after the last
SuSE release, then my shambles remains and my motivation
wanes (because there's a new release coming up that might
fix it...) until I install the next SuSE, and likely it gets fixed
automatically...
or else it's now a completely different problem that prevents
whatever I wanted from working.

For example, having installed 10.0 two nights ago, it will now
take me at least a couple of hours to get DVD-player stuff working
(including finding my decss stuff, finding un-pre-broken rpm* of
xine that's intended for 10.0 and not some earlier SuSE,
reading through old SLE posts to get the procedure straight,
agonizing over not finding the rpms where they were the
last time - or finding them only for 9.3 -, etc., whereas you
probably have a script that does it in ten minutes, including
download time. But it took me three or four months with
SuSE 9.0, a couple of years ago, because of all the wrong
paths I took (including two months to get apt-get working,
because that was how the most consistent and encouraging
thread in SLE explained it).

Different world-view. Different talents. Different use for the
computer. I know it's not pretty, but that's what you are
dealing with, here, and I'm not alone. When Linux went
beyond pure command-line geek toy, people like me came
out of the woodwork, and most of us don't have the sense
to go away. :-)

Kevin
(* I hold out for rpms because I don't want to undermine the
rpm database and YaST's/YOU's usefulness)

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• Previous message: Steve Graegert: "Re: [SLE] Backing up huge files"
• In reply to: James Ogley: "Re: [SLE] Epiphany issue"
• Next in thread: John R. Sowden: "Re: [SLE] Epiphany issue"
• Reply: John R. Sowden: "Re: [SLE] Epiphany issue"
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