Dual boot problem 28

Yes.

No. The developpers are much more sensible people, in general. There are developpers behind KDE too. (By the way, I just tried Konqueror, the KDE filesystem browser, and found the device files. KDE is generally much nicer to look at, and feels more consistent, to me at least, than Gnome.) But development of desktops is sufficiently different from developping the kernel, that I can understand that Allan Cox & friends stick to improving the kernel, and let others take care of the userland development.

However, it is a point that Linux in general has developped through people scratching their itches. Since development requires so much knowledge about the underlying technology, using command line tools becomes second nature for the developer, and then developing a desktop becomes something you do out of a vision of someting better for others, not a personal itch.

The command-line warriors is a different kind of people. Yet there are ten sensible ones of them too for each one who fill up this newsgroup with impertinent displeasures. I will probably always be a commandline friend, but I have no problem seeing that when I approach a new system a good gui can let me discover my options much faster than a book and a gui.

No. I got it wrong. The book is almost always badly written and buttumes the reader knows all the issues and all the jargon. That means I am comparing good guis with bad books. Actually, sometimes, I look over the option set of a command line tool, and get a nice overview of all the options in a glance or two. Sometimes I look at a new gui program, scan quickly through the menues and have the "tool-tip" appear for each one, if I am unusure what it does, and I get the same overview. The real issue is that I am a programmer, and the command line lets me express myself quite well. I tend to feel limited in bad guis, while I find it easier to program around bad command-line tools.

Yes. I too would like to see free software prevail, and I share that view. If we want to reach the mbuttes, we must take the mbuttes seriously. My doctor is an inteligent man, but he does not want to learn system administration. He wants a computer that is easy and intuitive to use, like a phone, or a TV set. (Actually tv sets are not very intuitive, but they have so few functions that they get away with a poor user interface.) But people want to use computers for their (the people's) purposes, with a minimum of hbuttle. They want to be able to do things without much thinking, just like you can walk without thinking about what muscles to contract when.

There should be room for all sorts of animals in our zoo. You are welcome, despite the unavoidable infantile jerks hanging out here. One just has to ignore them.

In the case of Konqueror mounting the suse parbreastion, I would blame the "helpfull" hotplug system that was likely behind the extra lines in the fstab. This could be a school example of how things go wrong because a complete desktop is enormously complicated to get right, and the task has been divided between groups of people who had little ambition of coordinating their efforts. Each has had a mental picture of making a small improvement over the pure command-line and ascii config file state of affairs. The KDE people have probably buttumed that the fstab contains what the user puts in there, and not thought of safeguarding against mistakes. The hotplug guys are more questionable here, in my view. They *should* have considered the situation of multiple distros, which is not so uncommon. (But then, they have perhaps thought that the doctor who wants a computer simple as a phone, does not have multiple distros. I think that is the wrong perspective. When things get automated, we developers buttume a responsibility that lay with the users before.)

The boot admin tool is more questionable. I don't know who is behind it. I think it is a bad move to make tools so incomplete. And it's a very bad move to provide no sensible error messages. That is really one thing that used to be better in the Unix tradition than in the MS one. Ever saw this popup "some file or dll was not found" or similar? The Unix tradition is to provide the file name. Why must we return to the level of MS at this point?

When I was a kid, some medicines came with a simple device that would release one drop of the contained liquid at a time. The prescription typically said "three drops in a glbutt of water, once per day".

Yes, but I also realized you were providing almost as much as you could. When I hear people try lilo and fail, I automatically buttume they used the command line, and should have been able to post what they wrote and what response they got. With guis, this is hard, and when I or the others in the newsgroup don't know the tool, it helps little to describe the buttons.

There was a command line behind the scenes. The gui issues a grub command using the "system()" call, system("grub-install blah blah");. It should have been simply system("grub-installdev-hda10");.

Thanks for the details. Maybe I will take the time to look at the Mandrivia web site, and see if there is a place to inquire about the two (three!) problems.

-Enrique