Apologies to most, but not all:

My apologies (to all but two) for the rant. Thing was, I 
had taken my NetBSD laptop in to work  instead of the 
Win98 laptop I usually take. I'd been working to convince 
the  boss that I might employ NetBSD in the lab for some 
remote-access security stuff: vnc over mgetty, ssh or 
ip-tunnel. We've got a new lab being built in Detroit; 
and something like that would be handy. Might save some 
four-hour road trips for him and me both. He'd been 
moderately impressed with the idea, until yesterday, 
accepting on faith my assumption that it could be made to 
work. He'd even given up a spare machine, and let me 
install NetBSD and hook it into the net and all.

But boss isn't much impressed yet. I have yet to really 
get it all going. And why should he be? To him I figure 
it just looks like DOS or someting. So I figure to show 
him what other, less arcane and geeky things I had also 
gotten for free (aside from $300 spent on Unix books) on 
NetBSD. I bring in my laptop, the one with NetBSD and 
KDE2 just installed the day before, instead of my regular 
Windows box. And what do you  suppose happened then?

While on-line, boss asks me to do just two things: hunt 
up certain stuff on the web, archive them and email a zip 
over to him. A personal favor, not even work really. I 
hadn't been able to get him to take any notice up until 
then. And...first thing...the archiver on KDE won't run, 
but gives up a big fat error message for the boss to read 
that says something about "Can't start sub-process." 

"Hm. Er. I'll figure that out later", say I to my boss. 
"For now, I'll just forward them to you as separate 
attachments." And then KMail locks up and  won't do a 
blessed thing.

So boss is thinking it looks like I probably got what I 
paid for from the free OS. And so was I at that point. I 
expect that now he's also wondering about that box I've 
gone and wired into our intranet with the five NT's.

Come the end of the day I went home, and composed a 
politely worded query about whether Gnome might be better 
than KDE. And KMail locked up solid on that machine too. 
So now I've got nothing except for my Windows box. 

I stayed up quite late trying to get the damn thing to 
work...to no avial. So I came in to work again on the 
next day, short on sleep, and with the enigma still 
unresolved. And of course my boss takes note of 
the fact that I've shown up toting the Gateway (Win98) 
instead of the ThinkPad (NetBSD).

Beyond this, know that I had secretly been hoping to 
replace my use of Windows on all my own machines at home. 
I was hoping to maybe teach my son to use something 
other than Windnows. 

But obviously, with the way that KDE performs on NetBSD 
(where the blame lies I don't care) and what with nobody 
but nobody responding in the definite to my core question 
of "Is Gnome as broken as KDE" (except for Al who kindly 
said he'd go and check), I am now quite disillusioned. 

Without a reliable GUI desktop, any OS would be useless 
for the bulk of the work I routinely do. So...after two 
months of personal study and expense, I  was really 
pretty unhappy.

Note that I'm sending this from my Win98 laptop at work. 
I can't imagine ever bringing the ThinkPad with NetBSD on 
it ever to work again. Not at least until I've run it 
error free at home for at least a month.

Perl, Apache, CGI and GhostScript have all been ported 
over to Win2K. For me, they seem to work quite well 
enough in what I've need them to do so far. 

That, in fact, was the lure to NetBSD. I had thought that 
it  might be nice to learn how to run Perl and such on 
their original home OS. It was, as they say in the 
descriptions of NetBSD...an "experiment". 

Anyway, apologies to all but the two who responded with 
"f--- you". To them I  refuse the invitation. I'm sure I 
don't know them well enough. And besides, I  don't even 
think that they were girls. You two, of course, do as you 
just as  you please. It's a free country. But that's just 
not at all my thing...really.  Thanks but no thanks. 
Maybe you can console each other?

Regards,

Gan

 



--
Mysterious Starling -- Rarest 
Extinct Bird
     _         
   <(+)__        Gan Uesli Starling 
     ((__/)=-    Kalamazoo, MI, USA
      `||`      
       ++        http://starling.ws 

Newbie-2-Newbie NetBSD Unix 
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