jmoiron.net

And of course, general gripes. I can't really figure out how to get USB working in linux. I mean, with my own compiled kernel. Because Patrick's works just fine, but any I compile myself (ex. 2.6.x) don't see to work for shit. It's one of the reasons I keep the stock slackware 9.1 kernel on my laptop, and one of the reasons that if I get enough of a headache with something, I just try and do it on there instead. If worse comes to worse, I could always try it on windows, or my mac.

Johnny seemed to solve my problem; that /proc/bus/usb was not being mounted. After mounting it (manually), things worked as expected, and my camera worked again in gtkam, which I thankfully did not have to go through the mountainous bullshit to compile again, because I decided to try out Dropline 2.6. Everything loaded up nice (Cannon Digital IXUS 400), and I copied a few pics off of there without incident. I went to copy the 11 movies I had on there (of a few pledges singing some songs), and it didn't work. It told me that it couldn't find the file, and the camera activity indicator light kept flashing.

Strange. I redid the whole process, and got the same error. I figured out (after rinseing, washing, and repeating a few too many times to keep my temper from the situation) that I could save other files, just not that one. I try one more time, and my system locks up. It's not really locked up, but X won't die, and even switching to run level 3 and 2 did not stop the frozen display of fluxbox. So I reboot, and get this to happen a few more times. Finaly, I say "fuck it", and go to do this on my laptop.

Sure enough, I have problems with the same files (I managed to get all but 2 off). I delete all of the files but the two I want, but of course since the camera's OSD is a stinking pile of dogshit, I delete one of the ones that I wanted to keep by accident. I yank the USB cable and see which one is still on there; and it's the hilarious one with Dev stepping on a huge pile of glass and making quite a racket. I delete the extraneous movie, and load it up... and of course, it turns out that I delete the wrong one, because apparently "82" is less than "72". FUCK YOU CANNON.

I'm still not sure why I couldn't copy the movies off my camera, although I lost the best one. I'm not sure if my CF card is dead or dying, or if there is a bug in libgphoto, or if my actual camera is screwed up and can't handle 4 digit numbers anymore. But I do know that the OSD is inadequate (it should display a filename when you go to delete it) and that Linux has been pissing me the fuck off more often than not recently.

Theres one thing about taking coersion to actually work right; I'm fine with having to do that. Its a completely different story when you just don't work right at all and then provide no explanation. I know that I can never use Windows again, no matter how much I get pissed off, because in every case but this one, Linux programs tell me exactly what is wrong, and I can find out from the developer himself if what I'm running into is a known bug. Still, I'm not sure if I can continue to use my camera the way I have been anymore; next time I run into the problem I'm going to try loading it up in a CF reader or using Cannon's windows software. If shit is fucked up (but reads fine off the card), I'm going to have a conniption.

Gnome-2.6 is a lot nicer when things actually work, but I found the experience to be a whole lot of "Wow, this is really slow". After getting used to the speed of Fluxbox and KDE, I don't know if I can even deal with the candy-coated slowmotion life of gtk+2. Some stuff that worked that didn't last time wasn't too impressive; although the Nautilus "image collection" view is quite nice (after about 5 minutes to load up all my images; maybe I won't have this problem in the future, since it seems 5% of my images will be corrupted and unsavable).

Overall, the icon and toolkit themes in Gnome are far superior to anything that the KDE/Qt folks have to offer, but the slowness and lack of solid improvements still injure Gnome 2.6 quite severely. The new nautilus spatial browsing is an enormous step backwards.

And speaking of enormous steps backwards, xmms is still insisting that people still use gtk+1 for anything other than xmms, so that's forced some other hackers/developers to take the xmms source and create beep. This was done a long time ago, of course, but Todd at Dropline finally got sick of compiling glib and gtk+1 and decided to ditch xmms for beep. This would have been a big "bravo", if beep wasn't the most bugprone, error-ridden piece of software in the history of mankind.

To be kind its still early in its development, I guess, but some errors really shouldn't be happening. For instance; when I change the font on my playlist from ultra-huge-bolded-mess one size smaller, it crashes. When I try to change it to some other font, it crashes. When I window-shade the playlist, then try to unshade it, it screws up. If I repeat this, it crashes. If I drag it to the top of the screen, it won't move to the left corner. I have to drag it along the left side of the screen to push it to the top; if I window shade it at the top, it moves down 2 pixels, and if I un-window-shade it, it crashes. I guess it plays music, I'm just not allowed to see what's next or listen to flac. Or move it, or click any buttons. And If I play with gtk2 or gnome settings at all; it crashes.

Too early for beep yet; but for the sake of humanity I hope it becomes stable in the next 6 months. It'd be a sad world where you're forced between a 3 year old library or some iTunes clone that can't handle your music collection. As for the rest of Gnome, more and more options are syphoned out of easy to find places and thrown into the depths of Gconf with each release. It feels far more cohesive than KDE does; but you get the feeling there's far less going on there, too. This is due to, in large part, because even with the Gconf options, Gnome simply is not as configurable as KDE. People complain about KDE's options all the time, but they manage to pack more into quasi-tolerable dialogs than the Gnome project codes at all. The Gnome guy's need to stop patting themselves on the back for usability awards and HiG compliant apps, and start making these apps not suck and actually usable again.