A Computer Pentagramors Infernal Nightmare

I would like to take a moment to discuss a serious issue and that is this:

Operating Systems are hard to install.

Unless you are dealing with a libc6 issue or installing Gentoo onto a 16TB SCSI server server, you will not run into big errors installing your OS. Below is a basic quiz on XP/Ubuntu/OSX. More complicated installs, will of course be more complicated. DUH! 😛 However, for the most part, most grandma users will not be running 5 partitions on their hard drives, so let’s look at this. Which OS installer asks you to do the follow:

Read and agree to an EULA.

Choose partition and filesystem.

Select region and language from a dropdown menus.

Select your keyboard. Hit Enter.

Name your computer something snazzy such as ‘POWERRANGERS’. Note: You may NOT use that as your computer name, I already took it. :P.

Setup admin/user passwords.

Select date/time.

Click FINISH.

This is a fundamental issue that bothers me to no end. At the very core of every OS, they all do the SAME thing. The difference, and the fun, and the reason why people stick a PARTICULAR OS is not what it can bring to the table in terms of world shattering innovation, but the IMPLIMENTATION with which it approaches OS issues that matters. On the levl of Firefox, or Pidin, or editing a picutre, NOBODY worried about IRQ or the 4th layer of the OSI model. That is not for the average person to consider or contemplate. IF they want to learn, and discuss such matters, there are plenty of places to learn about such matters.

Watching youtube videos however, wont change much better WIndows and OSX. And it shouldn’t. So when I hear people say ‘Installing Linux is hard’ or ‘OSX is so stupid’, I have to stand back and disagree with these statements.

goodbye.

First of all: a big THANKS to everyone who talked to me regarding my last ‘Dear lazywebs’ post. Now I have a new issue i can’t solve.

I have an ibook g4 machine running Debian Lenny PPC. Mainly I use it as a backup system for files, etc. My issue seems to be that I cant start KDE.

‘startx’ goes to a gray screen, and I can see the general outline for my mouse, but not much more than that, and the system doesn’t boot beyond there. The same goes for trying ‘X’ in a bash shell.

I would like to fix this, and/or provide more information and what is going on inside the system, but I dont even *know* how to start to diagnose this issue. KDE has treated me so well, it is not often that I need to fix anything in it.

Thanks!

-eddie m.

Hello all, maybe you can help me fix a problem with webbrowsers on Kubuntu Hardy Heron.As far as I can remember, the trouble all started 3 days ago or so.

When I go to start Firefox, it idles (meaning that the ghosty looking firefox icon starts on the panel) but never starts. If I try to open up 12 instances of firefox, maybe one or two windows might open. But most of the time, nothing opens. When the window goes open to The Google (which is a hilarious joke for everyone counting), it freezes and i have to do a hard ‘killall firefox’ for it. Just an fyi, even if the firefox window doesn’t open the process is seen running when i check htop or run ps aux | grep firefox.

I did a sudo aptitude purge firefox, and then I tried to ‘apt-get install firefox’. This resulted in
being told that the program is already installed. Sweet!

I tried to remove firefox using Adept, but the icons still appeared on my computer. And then I tried to run them, they tried to start up, as described above, but died epicly. So i had tried apt-get install firefox and it ‘installed’. mysteriously.

When I try to run Epiphany, it tried to open up and then it crashes. Great.

any and all suggestions are welcome, I just want to use a webbrowser on my home desktop again. konqueror’s inability to handle the websites I visit is very tiring and annoying.thanks all!