Linux Bugs.

So, just to let folks know here are the various Debian bugs that I've been tracking down answers to in the last few days. Please note that all of these are things I've had to find out about because my N00B expectations of things "just working" failed. In other words, I didn't go looking for these, they came looking for me:

1. USB devices don't have their activity lights go out when unmounted. This is an important psychological signal that the unmounting has actually occurred. Nevertheless no one is working on this bug as no one can agree at which point in the unmounting process to handle this.
2. Konqueror can stall for ages while writing to a USB key. This, again, turns out to be entirely a user interface issue. It turns out that Konqueror has 'stalled' because it is waiting for a slow sync to finish. However to most of the world 'Stalled' indicates that no work is being done, not that the program is waiting for work to finish. Had they said something like 'committing data', folks wouldn't keep thinking the program had hung...
3. Automounted VFAT and NTFS devices often get mounted with the wrong options set. There are many complaints of this and at least one of them that I found tends to argue that that is what caused my VFAT-related data-corruption of last week. This seems fixable by modifying the appropriate HAL policies, but its not clear if KDE will honor the policy changes. I'm still looking into this. Of course, I should not have to grovel through hal configuration documentation to set up user mounting policies...
   
4. dhcpclient fails to send a client hostname while asking for a DHCP lease. This caused DHCP to fail until I got it fixed. Alas, the only fix in Debian is to hard code the hostname into the dhcpclient config file. This bug has been outstanding since at least 2000. (I notice its fixed in Ubuntu though).
   
5. KMenuEditor is horribly buggy. It completely corrupted my KMenu, making it unworkable. I had to delete my config files and start over. This too has been a known bug for ages.
6. KDM themes are broken. This appears deliberate, but I've yet to find any explanation of WHY they were broken.
7. Because of the above, I'm using GDM to start my KDE sessions. At least the GDM themes work, although I've not found any (GUI) way to specify the screen resolution for the GDM greeter to use. Because of this, my greeter is always in an inappropriate resolution.
   
8. Compiz-fusion is in Lenny but requires taskbar-compiz and pager-compiz in order to work correctly. These are only available for KDE 3.5.10 and Debian KDE is 3.5.9. There does not appear to be any fix for this. If I want to use Compiz-fusion, I have to put up with a buggy taskbar and pager. Compiz also appears to mess up where windows open (often they're half-offscreen). This might be a config issue, but I've yet to figure it out.

Oh, and its not really a bug, per se, but I've yet to find any way in KDE to have a panel swallow a running application. If anyone knows how to get this to happen, I'd appreciate hearing about it. I find it hard to believe this isn't doable in KDE but I find there are many things in KDE that are done in a way I find hard to believe.