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

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

Clay suggested:
>Sounds like you have some serious problems. I've run the stock RH 6.1
>with Gnome/E and fvwm2 and never experienced any of the problems
>mentioned below. I would recommend reinstalling because you definately
>have something wrong with your setup. How about adding a drive to the
>system and doing a fresh install on it. Then you won't loose anything.
        I've installed 3 RH6.1 systems (ok, 2 were upgrades from  6.0). of
the two that have wish installed (the other is a text-console-only server);
both give the 'no display name/ no $DISPLAY environment variable' error.
        the two upgrades also have some sort of problem with less (or maybe
groff); as man pages have reverse-video'ed <AD> characters scattered within
them.

Chris Palmer suggested:
>How do you know it's X, specifically, that is crashing? 
        I assume that when I get dropped out of the GUI to my command shell
(gives the 'explicit kill or server shutdown' message, on several lines),
that's X 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)).
        I have no idea how GNOME/E is lauched in the default RH install. I
launch FVWM/FVWM2 by building an .xinitrc and specifiying 'exec fvwm2' as
the last line. without that file, it starts GNOME/E.

>What kind of stability do you get running twm(1) and a few xterm(1)s? The
>acid test.
        FVWM2 is pretty stable; running xterms and IRC client (X-Chat). I've
had it crash once or twice; but I think I can attribute that to Netscrape in
all cases.
        
>What X server are you using? Does it have any known stability issues? Are
>you using the latest stable version of it?
        I forget which X server it is; whichever one is for my Matrox
Mystique vid card, bundled with RH 6.1.

>> I still have to load the CD-ROM module by hand;
>Do you have some proprietary CD-ROM interface? 
        2x Sound Blaster, connected to the SB16 Pro sound card. uses the
sbpcd module. wonderful piece of hardware for 99% of what I need (almost no
CPU load playing CDs); tho it does have its limitations (not bootable).
        I just need to go back and poke at /etc/conf.modules and /etc/fstab
some more.

>>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?
        a: find a mailer with an interface I like. I'm spoiled on Agent for
Windows; and it's one of the best-designed programs I've ever seen.
eminently sensible keybindings; extremely configrable; heavily
multithreaded; and very reliable (possibly the most reliable Windows program
I've ever seen).
        I've used Pine once or twice; and must say that I despise it. back
in college I used PMDF and the EDT editor on a VMS system; and I could do
virtually everything the PINE users could commonly do, and do it 3x faster. :)
        Mutt looks interesting; I'm looking into it.
        I've tried the Mahogany mailer; and it looks interesting (supposed
to be a newsreader as well; and scriptable in Python). still very buggy tho.
        Looked at XFMail; but can't get XForms to install.
        Eucalyptus looks interesting; haven't had time to try it yet.
        what do people think of KMail?
        
        b: read mail via POP3, and be able to queue up messages to send,
while offline.

>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. 
        I'm not a big fan of Netscape's mailer interface.

>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.
        I've heard of Fetchmail; never learned exactly what it *does* tho.
        My experience with mail on Linux is setting up Sendmail on
constantly-connected systems.

>My favorite variation is:
>$ DISPLAY=':0.0'
>$ export $DISPLAY
>Any luck with that?
        thanks, will give it a try. :)

>Is X working, and then crashing, or failing to launch altogether?
        I've had GNOME/E launch, start to throw up some windows, then die.
sometimes it has lauched and stayed up, but the panel doesn't respond. I've
tried a kill -HUP on the panel's PID; and occasionally that works, sometimes
it doesn't.
        sometimes gnomeicu will lock up (searching for a new user will lock
it every time); and if I try to click on it's icon on the GNOME panel, that
may crash me back to the command line.

>> what do people use for an ICQ workalike program? I've been trying
>> GnomeICU;
>I had a Gtk+-based one once, I think it might have been gicq. Rumor has it
>that Licq is good (per Ben Beuchler).
        I think I tried gicq; but couldn't get it to install. I've heard
good things about licq and kicq; but they require Qt, which I'd prefer to
stay away from if I can (personal preference).

>> lets face it, Linux is still not for the average home user.
>The average user would have the very same problems under Windows.
        I disagree... Windows at least will get a basic configuration
*working* with a minimum of hassle. working *well* is nearly impossible, tho. :)

Tom Veldhouse wrote:
>Personally, I would keep digging
>through config files - because that is the only way a true understanding
>of what is going on will be reached.  
        that's what I'm working on right now. :)
        near as i can tell, what M$ Windoze has over Linux, is configuration
tools.  A lot of configuration is done automatically (for better or for
worse... often worse); and lots of things are fairly easy to figure out,
based on the tools you have 
        the config tools that linux has right now are very basic; they
usually don't have any depth to them, and they aren't very robust. (I spent
a couple of hours last night wrestling with ppp, wvdial, and the RH GUI
dialup connection configurator; all of which seemed to have very different
opinions of how things were configured [after I broke them, trying to work
on wvdial.conf by hand]. I learned a lot in the process, tho).

>I use Slackware - and configuration
>there is very straight forward.  It is very easy to create a very base
>system and then compile everything yourself - thus offering complete
>control.  I have done this with gnome (under /usr/gnome) and it works
>wonderfully with Enlightenment.  
        I've never touched Slackware. lots of people have given me lots of
different opinions about it. will have to try it sometime.

>I would like to know why the original
>author is not using debian if that is what he likes?
        because i didn't have a current Debian CD on hand. :) I use RH here
at work, and figured it was good enough to use at home. since I don't have a
fast net connection; nor did I feel like doing another Debian install from
floppies, I decided to try out RH's GUI installer.

in response to other queries about my hardware:
        autodetection of vid card & monitor went beautifully. sound card
much less so. cd-rom drive not at all (despite the fact that the install
went fine from it).
        if people like, I'll post my dmesg.

thanks for the tip on zICQ; will check it out.

thanks a lot everyone; will keep you updated as I work on this...

Carl Soderstrom
System Administrator	307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA		Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com	(612) 682-1091