Comments from a new user: what is Distrowatch complaining about?

[Tim]

On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 22:58 +0200, gilpel at altern.org wrote: 
> I'm a heavy clipboard user and I really don't like glipper slowly
> unfolding its list when it gets longer than a screen. So, I wanted to
> install klipper.
> 
> "yum install klipper" didn't produce any result, as urpmi klipper, in
> Mandriva would.

In the past, I've seen that sort of thing work (yum finding the right
package based on the name of something in it).  I've not tried it for a
while, but it should work.

> I would appreciate to see what Package Manager for GNOME is doing rather
> than doing its thing and giving no info.

Yes, me to.  That's why I use the command line, instead, for doing any
yum updating.

> Apparently, you better not click "Suspend" on a Desktop. First reboot
> ended on a blank screen, the second on a green striped screen, only the
> third succeeded. I suppose I shouldn't have done this, but what if the
> children use the computer and click it, just to see what happened... like
> I did? Maybe the option should be removed for desktops.

Works here, on some machines, not on others.  It doesn't matter whether
it's a desktop or laptop computer, it's hardware compatibility that's
the issue.  That said, you want an *easy* system-wide way to remove the
option when you know it doesn't work, or you don't want users using it
even if it does (e.g. computer labs), such as the suspend, shutdown and
reboot options.

> I couldn't install Abobe Flash as suggested by Fedorafaqs. Adobe's
> instructions are much simpler and work very well:
> 
> Download the x86_64 package, un gzip it on the desktop, copy to:
> 
> /home/my_user_name/.mozilla/plugins
> 
> Restart Firefox, go to YouTube :)

And, then, forever having to manually update Flash, instead of Flash
being updated with all your packages when you "yum update".  Seriously,
this is a very bad way of managing things, the hours of my time that get
wasted by Windows working that way (each thing needing manually
updating, often sequentially, then the computer needs rebooting,
interrupting anything else I might be doing at the same time), drives me
right up the wall.  Especially compared against simply running "yum
update" to sort out everything in one go.

> P.s.: I'll have a few questions about installing NVIDIA drivers --
> rpmfusion vs NVIDIA's own install program --

Very bad idea to use their own drivers.  You have the same problem I
just outlined (having to manually update things left, right and centre),
and their own package royally screwed up Xorg to suit themselves, rather
than installing itself in a proper manner to work with Xorg.

The nvidia drivers packaged for Fedora by repos designed not to stuff up
your Fedora installation, such as the rpmfusion compiled driver package,
are a much better idea.

> and watching evil WMV... 

Not difficult to sort out, and I found watching them works better on
Linux than Windows.  e.g. Windows would only play them from the start,
you couldn't fast-forward in and play (so you were screwed by anything
that got stuck, having to re-watch a long video several times, to finish
it, is annoying).  And *if* Windows did let you fast forward, there were
serious lags and delays between you trying to do what you want, and it
doing it.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.