[UFO Chicago] I give up

[Larry Garfield]

True story:

Last night, Nate stopped by ostensibly to test his hard drive on my new
spare Debian box to see if the drive had died or the motherboard
controller, and of course spent most of his time futzing with the system
and upgrading it despite my better judgment. :-)

Among other things, we upgraded from XFree 3.3.6 to XFree 4.  Of course,
that broke the mouse.  Badly.  It took over 45 minutes of wrestling with
the XFree package configuration tool, gpmconf, editing XF86Config,
reading documentation, and generally trial-and-error guess-and-check
work to slowly get the mouse incrementally better supported, with
several false steps and failures before we eventually were able to
achieve proper functionality from the rodent with the PS/2 tail.  

Meanwhile, I can hot-plug any PS/2 mouse into my Win2k box and it will
work.  It may not have support for all 4 buttons or have as much scroll
wheel customization as I would like, but the pointer moves and the two
main buttons click.

>From a completely pragmatic, non-philisophical,
I-just-want-to-get-my-work-done point of view (which is what 95% of the
world uses), guess which system kicks the crap out of the other?

Food for thought.

"Peter A. Peterson II" wrote:
> 
> Well Jordan, I for one, must say, that you really expressed something
> that I have been feeling a lot of doubt over in my own mind. I'm glad
> you brought it up and not me!
> 
> The more time I spend here at work, seeing the cool advances in
> Microsoft Active Directory, and the brilliant design of the Systems
> Management Server, as well as the dismal and uselss Linux Desktop, I'm
> really starting to wonder, a., if proprietary software can really be
> all that bad, or b., if the Linux Project really hasn't failed after
> all.
> 
> I mean, I really like all you guys and whatever, and I enjoy linux for
> it's geekiness and stuff, but like, I just want my computer to work,
> and I want to be able to play games, and I want to be able to read
> word documents. I'm just not convinced that all this stuff is really
> what it's cracked up to be.
> 
> Thanks for saying what I couldn't say.
> 
> Peter
> 
> _______________________________________________
> UFO Chicago -- Users of Free Operating Systems
> Free Software Rules -- Proprietary Drools!
> http://ufo.chicago.il.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ufo

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
lgarfiel@students.depaul.edu	ICQ: 6817012

-- "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you." :-)