On Feb 9, 2009, at 5:40 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
David Brownlee wrote:I never seem to "waste" much time on this. Getting the base system up, and X runnig usually goes rather fast. (But I'm also one of those guys who still use ctwm). What usually takes time is getting all the packages installed. But I guess I only have myself to blame for that, since I prefer to build form source, and that just means it takes time. I'll do that in one window, or on one screen when I don't even have X up, while I play around with something else in another.Random question for the day: How much time has been wasted (duplicated time and time again) by technically literate people who just wanted a basic desktop system setup so they could work on something that actually interested them, like adding new pkgsrc packages or drivers for some item of USB hardware?, or who just wanted to run the same OS for development on their laptop as they were running on their servers?Heck, I don't even need X up before I start working on something.Why is this fanatical focus on having a graphic environment? There are a lot of things I can do without even having ggraphics.
Given a choice, my main desktop is OSX... At work; I have no choice. A NetBSD desktop is required... I also still use ctwm.. I spent days trying to get NetBSD to run dual headed on a Matrox G-650. I finally brought a G-550 from home and it just worked. Then I fought with Firefox... I still fight with firefox.. It crashes on me about 5 or 6 times a day... Some sort of xorg "BadAlloc" resource starvation thing... I don't have a flash plugin and I've tried with noscript; it still crashes... I have another NetBSD desktop that I use for one thing and one thing only; that is to run Wireshark to watch the packets coming out of my embedded NetBSD target... If my target starts spooging packets at the fantastic rate of 24,000pps (yawn), then occasionally something in the wm0 driver causes a lockup and I have to reboot my wireshark box... Sure, I could waste a bunch of time debugging this stuff; but I have real work to do when I'm there... I'm paid hourly.
So on my desk, I have 4 monitors and 1 keyboard/mouse... 3 for NetBSD, 1 for corporate windows/outlook... My NetBSD machines run xterm, ctwm, firefox, wireshark, and xmms... Not a very taxing desktop; and still NetBSD does it poorly...
I even offered to buy my own Macbook and bring it in as my desktop but wasn't allowed...