Morning?

Slept in yet again. Doesn't seem to be much point in trying to sort my hours around until AFTER the new years party. After that I'll see what I can do to make sure I start waking up in the morning. I'm starting to miss seeing any sun.

( Latest Linux Wankery -- Feel free to skip )

Oh, and I'm trying to figure out how you tell KDE (or Gnome, for that matter) that you don't want to use the default file manager, but one of the other ones provided with your distro. It turns out that Konqueror (the KDE default) has issues when working on NTFS volumes. Sufficiently so that it keeps crashing in the middle of operations and making me do file system checks. I'm told that Thunar has no such issues and I would like to try it out instead.

Undocumented Changes.

Here's another Linux Pet Peeve. I've been writing them down here to document them, since when I'm not actively working on a Linux system I don't remember them. Then way I say to someone "Linux still doesn't seem ready for Prime Time", they want examples. (Of course when I CAN give examples, as I've been doing, they usually respond with "Oh, that's only an issue with P on distro Q. Use distro R and you won't have that." which, naturally, ignores the hundreds of issues that distro Q has...

In any case, I expect to spend all day trying to configure MLDonkey on my box. Its the 'default' P2P file service on Debian KDE. It comes with a set of documentation that is horribly broken. Mostly that's because the package, as shipped by Debian, uses none of the configuration or setup methods documented by the package. It seems the Debian folks have decided to use some other homebrew method of setting it up and/or configuring it, none of which work, and none of which they have documented. Certainly the install wizard that came with the debian package fails spectacularly.

See, here's a real problem with the Linux community in general. They assume you'll use a command-line system to install everything since everyone is intimately familiar with every subsystem a package could touch, and how to make them play nicely. The GUI is added as an afterthought, is seldom tested, and is often horribly broken in a large number of ways. Now even this, I could live with, if the documentation that accompanied the package for the CLI install (and which is absolutely required from the command line -- you could get away without it if the GUI "just worked") was A) present and B) accurate. Often it manages to be neither which is quite a feat when you think about it.