Title4Clicks

Story: Debian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!Total Replies: 11
Author Content
azerthoth

Aug 13, 2009
6:45 PM EDT
This artice isnt anything more than a rant about "I dont have my packages" whine. Heavy on noise, low on signal.
bigg

Aug 13, 2009
6:51 PM EDT
The best solution is to look for another distro. Linking this to acceptance of free software is silly. If I were to complain about a distro, it certainly wouldn't be Debian, they do it their way.
caitlyn

Aug 13, 2009
7:57 PM EDT
Quoting:I didn’t contact these developers and I’m not going to name names (of course I can’t avoid mentioning the package names), because there’s really no point — I know and you know that these attitudes are endemic throughout our whole community, so it’d be unfair to single-out these three people.


Funny, when I write to developers and packagers of Linux distributions with questions or complaints I have, without exception, received a courteous reply. I've even received thanks for pointing out legitimate problems. So the idea that talking to developers in the Linux community is pointless and that bad attitudes are endemic is a load of crap.

I do see one bad attitude present. It belongs to the author.

Oh, and if Debian packages are badly built switch to a distro that does it better. Debian is neither the most popular distro nor is it considered the easiest to use. (Honestly, though, it really isn't difficult anymore.)

Is it just me or has Free Software Magazine published a lot of rubbish lately?
tuxchick

Aug 13, 2009
9:05 PM EDT
Agreed, Az. The author took three incidents and blew them up into "This is why all of Debian sucks, and why nobody will ever use them!!" It's like finding a few spoiled bananas at the grocery store, and launching a tirade on how nobody will ever shop at the store again ever. I guess he never noticed how much proprietary software ships bug-riddled and never gets fixed, or is abandoned-- so shouldn't it be dead by now?

**edit** I've yet to run into a showstopping issue with Linux; I could always find some kind of workaround or fix, even if it did mean distro-hopping. For example, I'm using 64 Studio for audio production after trying Ubuntu Studio and some other options, and it's a dream come true. An absolutely beautiful, excellent distro. But I've always thought that if there was some app that had problems and I really really wanted it fixed there would be a way to make it happen. Offer a bounty, give it some publicity and try to get some new contributors interested, something, anything other than just crabbing about it. At least try, anyway.
gus3

Aug 13, 2009
9:52 PM EDT
@tc:

{sidetrack} How do you find Studio64? I just bought a tape deck, to transfer some of my irreplaceable cassettes to MP3 or Vorbis, or maybe even FLAC. Do you think Studio64 will help make that job easier?
Steven_Rosenber

Aug 13, 2009
10:08 PM EDT
I've been annoyed by years-neglected bugs in distros just like this guy. I also have to agree with bigg -- if you can't get your work done in a given distro, don't kill yourself, just find another distro that does what you want and need it to do.
tuxchick

Aug 13, 2009
10:27 PM EDT
It's 64 Studio, gus3. It has all the same audio and video apps you can put on any Linux; what sets it apart is it's very stable and fast, and it has all the low-latency kernel tweaks you need for good computer audio. I don't know if there are any specialty Linux apps for digitizing legacy media; I use Audacity.

http://www.64studio.com/
gus3

Aug 13, 2009
10:33 PM EDT
Right, 64 Studio. I must still have Commodore 64 in the back of my mind somewhere...
tuxchick

Aug 13, 2009
10:37 PM EDT
Yeah, you old people never quite make it all the way into the present.....

/runs
gus3

Aug 13, 2009
11:52 PM EDT
Hey now, no making fun of my receding hairline!
tuxchick

Aug 14, 2009
12:43 AM EDT
After spending an hour struggling to make Firefox play sound through my USB headset, and cussing Gnome's infinitely irritating habit of hiding the real application names, and carefully concealing everything useful and making sure you have no idea WTF command you're actually messing with, I changed my mind. The article is not nearly ranty enough. Growl! Foam!! Stab!! Die Gnome slowly and painfully, hahahaaaa in fear and agony. Would a nice little Help-About be too much to ask? Apparently yes.

For anyone else struggling with this problem, this is what worked on 64 Studio, which I don't know if it customizes Gnome or horks it like Ubuntu. But by god it works now.

Firefox looks only for the default sound card, so first use asoundconf to find your sound card names, and then to set the default to your USB device. Do this only as an ordinary user, not as root:

$ asoundconf list

Names of available sound cards: NVidia MobilePre Headset

$ asoundconf set-default-card Headset

Then go into Preferences-> Sound and set the 'Sound Events' and 'Music and Movies' playback to ALSA. I don't know if Firefox needs to be restarted; I'm so vexed and rummy I forgot and I don't care either. You figure it out.

It seems that setting these to USB Audio should work, but once it did and once it didn't, so this might not be the definitive way to do it. This will be a LinuxPlanet article when I work it out more completely. A nice calm one.

Oh, and that silly-looking little Gnome volume control in the systray? If you right-click or double-click it actually brings up a mixer, which is a graphical front-end to alsamixer. Do Edit->Change Device when you have more than one sound card.

I hate computers. Thank you, we'll be here all week!
Bob_Robertson

Aug 14, 2009
12:14 PM EDT
When I first used Linux, I mean really first, back in 16 floppy disks to install (because I didn't know about accessing repositories on the 'Net so I got the entire Debian of the day), I wrote to one developer to ask, "What is the default directory for the HTML files for the web server?"

The Debian developer responded in great hostility and vitrol, with several comments that added up to RTFM!

I wrote back, saying where I had looked and what I'd read, and he realized that I had in fact Read The Fine Manual and it wasn't there. He had assumed that I would know it's /var/www

That was also before I knew about /usr/share/doc which, in Debian at least, is the wellspring of all technical information. It's not always UNDERSTANDABLE, but it's there.

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