Re: Hot complaints about YDL 2.1


Subject: Re: Hot complaints about YDL 2.1
From: Paul J. Lucas (pauljlucas@mac.com)
Date: Sun Oct 28 2001 - 19:46:46 MST


On 28 Oct 2001, Jake Feasel wrote:

> I just purchased 2.1. Much to my excitement, it arrived recently. I
> had been using 2.0, and I was fairly happy with it.

        Then why did you upgrade if you were happy with it? As I've
        mentioned before, this rampant tendency to upgrade "just
        'cause" should stop.

> However, it didn't try to save me when I made an incorrect choice for my X
> configuration (color depth 32 instead of 24 - a no no on a TiBook)

        Assuming you actually have valid reasons for upgrading, you
        should upgrade only what you need. You can upgrade your
        kernel, many RPMs, and X Windows all by yourself and under your
        total control making sure to keep backups of everything. You
        don't need a complete distribution upgrade to do any of these
        things. (The only really tricky thing to upgrade is glibc.)

        (When I am tweaking my X config, I make sure I am ssh'd into
        the machine so in case I completely lock up my console, I can
        still be on the machine to kill -9 processes or do a clean shut
        down if necessary.)

> Have they improved the power management for my TiBook, in that it goes to
> "sleep" when I close the screen? Nope.

        Although I agree the YDL installer should do a better job, you
        really need to understand the distinction between the kernel,
        third party software, and YDL which, except for things like the
        installer itself and yup, is merely a bundling of OTHER
        people's software, and therefore correspondingly not blame
        those who are not responsible.

        The "they" in your sentence can not refer to the folks who make
        YDL: "they" have nothing to do with power management support,
        or support for any other piece of hardware or aspect thereof.

        The "they" is "the kernel authors," most of whom couldn't care
        less about PPC, let alone power managment on a single laptop
        from a company that only has 5% market share. Let's get real
        here. The fact that anything at all works on Apple hardware,
        let alone power management, is due to the efforts of a few
        Linux PPC developers who I think I can count on one hand.

> What about the configuration / apps? It comes with a *really* old version of
> AbiWord (0.7 - current is like 0.9.4).

        So upgrade it yourself with a later PPC RPM (if it even exists)
        or compile it from source yourself.

> It doesn't come with BlueFish, Quanta Plus, Nautilas (WTF!?!).

        You're free to install those youself too; so stop your whining,
        please.

        Personally, what I want in a distro is a reasonable default
        kernel (that I will later reconfigure myself) and doing
        reasonable things with all the scripts and config files under
        /etc. (Both Redhat and Mandrake do some REALLY bizarre things
        there and I spend hours cleaning up their crap when I do Intel
        Linux installs.)

        I can install whatever other software I want myself. Many
        software packages are already outdated by the time the GM CD is
        pressed anyway.

        - Paul



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