Matt’s Blog

Some things that ought to be banned:

• Parking meters (and other payment machines) that don’t give any change so you end up paying more than the actual fee
• Quiz TV channels that run quizzes 24 hours a day and require you to call a premium rate phone number in order to answer some inane question
• Spam email, junk paper mail and cold calling
• Cash machines where you have to pay to get your money out - I noticed recently that one chain of motorway service stations here in the UK seem to only have this sort of machine nowadays…

I was happy to see that the version of Wireless Assistant (a KDE GUI for connecting to WiFi networks) inluded in Ubuntu Dapper seems to work a lot better than the version included in Ubuntu Breezy. At last it finds my wireless network and allows me to connect to it after specifying the appropriate keys.

I’m rather saddened to find, however, that it doesn’t apply the settings to the default config (eg. /etc/network/interfaces) so that my laptop would connect to the wireless network on boot… Instead it seems to rely on me logging into KDE and using the Wireless Assistant to connect each time. How lame. I will of course have to now just edit the files manually as before and only use the Wireless Assistant when I want to connect to some network whilst out and about.

I think that GUI application designers sometimes miss the point with this sort of thing. They seem to assume that because I’m making changes to settings from within KDE, that I’d only want them to be applicable for KDE and not generally system wide. It’s the same with adding printers for example. If I add a printer from within some nice GUI inside KDE I still want to be able to print to it using lpr when I’m at the command line. I think GUIs are great for making configuration changes, especially to things that aren’t changed frequently, but they really should be GUIs to the system wide config IMHO.

A couple of times recently I’ve wanted to try out some new software, only to be thwarted by a list of prerequisites as long as my arm. I’m talking about cutting edge software for Linux in particular… it often relies on cutting edge libraries that aren’t available in most Linux distributions. Getting all the right versions of those dependencies can become a major nightmare, having to build from source and often having to patch them in some way.

Two projects where I’ve recently had problems like this are Jokosher and Diva. Both these look like excellent bits of software, but the list of requirements make them a nightmare to try out. Some of the prerequisites are not available as packages for many distros and there are some requirements that need CVS versions of libraries and special patches. It just makes it too difficult to try the software out for anyone except the most determined user.

It seems to me that in order for cutting edge projects like these to get more people trying them out, it would be a good idea for them to produce a live CD which I could just boot from and have everything set up ready for them to work. All the right libraries and dependencies already there. Surely, with the number of live distros out there, it wouldn’t be too hard for them to take one of those, such as Knoppix, and modify it to include whatever dependencies they have? This would save such a lot of effort of those wanting to try out these bits of cutting edge software and would surely reduce the number of people that just give up…