Re: [TCLUG:10969] GNOME configuration questions/musings

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:

> X crashes on a pretty regular basis (GNOME more so);

How do you know it's X, specifically, that is crashing? X itself has only
once given my any stability-related trouble (and it wasn't a crash) in two
years of using it. If the GNOME environment is launched via exec(1), the
whole X system would go down if GNOME died (that's normal for exec(1)).

What kind of stability do you get running twm(1) and a few xterm(1)s? The
acid test.

What X server are you using? Does it have any known stability issues? Are
you using the latest stable version of it?


> I still have to load the CD-ROM module by hand;

Do you have some proprietary CD-ROM interface? Or is it a SCSI or
ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM drive? Not sure what you men by 'module' here. Once your
CD-ROM device (e.g., /dev/hdb, /dev/scd0) is linked to /dev/cdrom, you
should be able to do 'mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom' and be
happy. The driver for it would be your normal IDE or SCSI device driver,
which normally are not compiled as modules, but right into the kernel
itself.


> wish doesn't work; and setting up a mail system for dial-up is still
> pretty far over my head.

How do you mean? Do you need a POP client, or an SMTP server, or something
else? What is your goal for mail?

If you want to read your mail on your machine, the easiest thing to do is
to set up Netscape Communicator as your POP client and read your mail with
Netscape. That's what I plan to do for my mom, for example. Another good
one is to use a POP client like Fetchmail or POP-Perl5 and then a mail
reader like Pine or Mutt.


> lets face it, Linux is still not for the average home user.

The average user would have the very same problems under Windows.
Instability of the desktop environment, CD-ROM driver weirdness, and
configuring a mail client are all quotidian problems among Windows users.
The only difference between a modern Linux and Windows is that Windows
comes pre-installed and partially pre-configured. Underneath, they have
the same (serious) usability issues.

Imho. :)


> wish doesn't work. gives an error something like 'no $DISPLAY
> environment variable'. I've tried chewie's suggestion of 'export
> $DISPLAY=:0.0' (and many variations thereon);

My favorite variation is:

$ DISPLAY=':0.0'
$ export $DISPLAY

Any luck with that?

> I've tried looking through the system configuration files, trying to
> find where $DISPLAY is supposed to be set; but no luck.

That's something xinit does for you; :0.0 is the default and is
overridable on the command line or even perhaps in XF86Config (but I could
be wrong about the latter).

> This problem may also be related to the problems I have with X crashing,
> since I think I've seen a similar error message a few times after X
> crashes.

Is X working, and then crashing, or failing to launch altogether?


> what do people use for an ICQ workalike program? I've been trying
> GnomeICU; but it requires GNOME (and I prefer FVWM2 in a lot of ways), and
> it crashes on a regular basis, usually crashing GNOME, often crashing X
> (I need to take this up with the author, since I can cause crashes
> repeatably). I'd like to find a reliable ICQ workalike that runs happily
> under FVWM/FVWM2.

I had a Gtk+-based one once, I think it might have been gicq. Rumor has it
that Licq is good (per Ben Beuchler).

> netscape crashes -- this in and of itself doesn't surprise me. why
> it brings down X in the process, does. this may go back to the $DISPLAY
> problem.

Yeah, that's bad news. My guess would be a buggy X server. Make sure
you're running the latest version of your X server and of Netscape.


Hth,
-- Chris

  Christopher Reid Palmer : www.innerfireworks.com