I ATENT DEAD#

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:20:50 +0000

Right now, I'm too angry to be dead, but this is a natural result of attempting to use GNOME. In general I'm not dead but too busy (and with too little internet) to be blogging about it right now.

• new laptop (see above)
• Thames Festival
• new boots are arriving some day soon, yay
• the experience of going back to FSKs temporarily
• moving house with a Cycles Maximus workbike. If you knew my old address and I haven't told you the new one, please hassle me for it.
• and there was something else I can't remember, too

but for the moment I leave you with this: the point of Unix is that you can tell what's going on, and have a clue where to start looking when nothing is apparently going on. To get GNOME Network Manager (apparently the approved thing for a wireless laptop) working is needlessly complicated when (a) the icon which I guess should appear doesn't, (b) the manual doesn't actually explain that there even should be an icon (as I said, I guessed), (c) googling - thank goodness I still know how to configure interfaces manually, eh? don't know what the GNOME Typical User would do here, other than reinstall Windows - is the only way to find out that nm-applet is the magic thing to start, (d) googling again for the error message it produces when it starts directs me via a snotty message to /usr/share/doc/network-manager-gnome/README.Debian (again, I wonder how the Gnome Typical User would find this) which says I should add myself to the netdev group, (e) having done all that it produces a list of local wireless networks and/or a swirling thing in the top right hand corner of the screen, but doesn't actually connect to my wireless router - even after asking (twice, now) for my WEP key

Running iwconfig and dhclient from a terminal works perfectly (and is how I'm connecting to post this), so I can't even guess what the error message it's hiding from me might me. It's been sitting there swirling for the entire time I've spent writing this, though.

If any of the developers of this misbegotten creation stumble across this blog entry, they will probably even now be muttering "so send a bug report" at their screens. Because rants like this aren't helpful, and reports are. Let me be absolutely clear about this, because I'd hate to be misconstrued: I have no intention of helping. The purpose of reporting bugs is to produce better software, and this software is so completely misguided that I have no interest in making it better. It's one thing in normal use to hide technical messages from users that might be confused by them, it's quite another to hide them when the bloody thing doesn't otherwise work.

I don't think this GNOME installation is going to last the day, to be honest.

Nice laptop (HP nc2400), though.