Thursday, January 15, 2009

Bug Bang II: Revenge of The Devs

If you've read BugBang One, you probably won't be surprised that it just lies there, with no one assigned to it. It's not much of a surprise, really. It's called:
re-enable the Autologin feature through a Login Management GUI
And if you try a search with "Autologin"as keyword in the gnome-bugzilla you won't find it. How interesting.

In the meantime, I attacked Fedora up front with a nasty one: with certain sets of icons, the on-display visual for AudioVolume Up/Down/Mute is ugly: an unscaled, very little icon made big by compiz.

On-Screen display of sound volume on laptop
screens is blurry, ugly

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Fedora 10 - was perfect, crisp and detailed with F9

How reproducible:

Choose any install media (liveCD, txt-installDVD,...)
they do the same.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Assign ctrl-F10-11-12 to the sound volume Mute-Down-Up
2. Use it
3. See the poor on-screen result

Actual results:
Poor, blurry graphic

Expected results:
Crisp, like the one for Laptop Brightness

If you care checking the link, you will learn more than I know, since after being Deeply and Vastly explained that if my computer looks shit it's because of custom icons that I fiddled with, and that then, it was up to me to report the bug to each icon set's maintainers so that this behaviour stopped. Before I quit getting back to the thread again and again, (they closed it anyway) I took some carefully chosen words to explain them that I didn't agree and that maybe, if the community is doing its job in reporting bugs to the distribution, it could be up to the distro maintainers to actually chase them with the FlyTox can.

That was after getting this, as the issue after being told to issue strange command-lines as root and edit some obscure config-files:
Feel free to file separate bugs against the icon
theme that are causing problems.
gnome-settings-daemon only use
gtk_image_set_from_icon_name() with
the size GTK_ICON_SIZE_DIALOG,
looking for audio-volume-* icons.
I felt somehow compelled to write that:
I kind of can't escape the feeling of being at
the wrong desk at the post office,
in front of a 50-ish hair-coloured lady
busy doing her knitting... In a foreign country
where I don't speak the language.

So much for _my_ time then.

I have a laptop that looks shit to
the outside world; would the community-spirit answer
be "Hey, that's a Fedora install, we can't ship that!
I'll pass the info along, and since I am getting paid
and not you, I will even take care that it actually
get fixed"?

Never, ever.

CLOSED - NOTABUG said the lady. Next please!
I know they replied, but I didn't bothered to check/assess/relaunch the flame part. I did my job. And at first, I even did it politely.

Oh, and the faulty icons are standard, out-of-the-box, normal ones from a conventional install.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Gremlins of Open Source Software

What a fucking day today.

It seems that every time stuff kinda works, and in any possible, logical way I want to built upon it to improve/update/refine, the rest has to fail.

For two years, this Fedora 7 workstation served me well. It was so bloated with the hundreds of libraries and concurrent applications running together than it has become a dog, slow like hell on this otherwise upscale dualcore 2.66Ghz.

Time for an upgrade, and, what the heck, my little Tropical Ice Cube http://tic.zenerves.net is here to provide me with all the latest software, isn't it?

There are myths out there, Distributions famous that you know if you "master" them you will be safe, and sound. And a little bit proud, too.

Here is My Fucking Failure List; All that in One Single Afternoon, believe it or not:

-Gentoo install: no X system, no graphic nothing then, no network. I knew it, though, it's not my first try. The last time, network was achieved with some nasty scripts... Can't remember...

-SabayonLiveCD: knetworkmanager forces addresses out of my ip range, lock them with no option to define manually - a pity, looks superb, and comes with nvidia drivers, SecondLife, googleearth and other nasty goodies [assaultcube2 :) ].

-Sabayon Install plain crashes "exception this/that" WTF.

-CentOS Install fail to get the three other OS on this machine, graphic installer send my screen haywire anyway. I don't want to ruin my boot partition, so didn't went any further.

-Slackware, the so-introduced "Main Workstation @ tropical central": no printer client running, no microphone, no webcam - the gspca maintainer hasn't been seen on his sourceforge page since at least 4 months, why the heck is this module compiling fine on Fedora 7 (a hog) and not on Slackware, the supposedly Ultimate Compiler Machine? Then, I realised that the firewall is wide open with not the slightest GUI in sight from the over-bloated KDE control Centre (unlike SuSE) and what else? There were things that worked out-of-the-box: Flash on Youtube, DVD playing... Shitte, I almost mistook the Old Slack for Linux Mint here. Is it really supposed to be failing to connect to a cups server, but allow you spend your afternoon whatching http://www.europafilmtreasures.fr/PY/298/ ? And I am still doing a non-gaphic login, on top of that, after switching to runlevel5.

THEN, one "customer" from yellowpages calls to complain about his ubuntu install: no automatic way to hook to SAMBA network share when he boots his computer; no SAMBA printer in view either. Sent him on the PPLUG list, http://groups.google.com/group/pplug, said he should ask there since I, for one, know I can't help.

Especially, today.

And I am out of bandwidth for the whole month with all this twitteries & facebookage and bloggerish you are supposed to do to be in the loop.

Long Life Free Software, Freedom to Damn Yourself to the teeth in half-breed libraries, unsupported hardware and arcane text-file-based unix-like-20-years-ago Operating Sytems.