The RTFM Mentality

Recently I was searching for the answer to an issue I was having. Google sent me to forum after forum, and they were full of people asking for help. Overwhelmingly I saw responses that boiled down to RTFM. Now I do agree that generally that's the answer, but if the person is asking for help at least point them in the right direction. RTFM... man blah and pay attention to section XYZ is a much better answer. If somebody is drowning, don't tell them to learn to swim. Throw them a rope and while you're pulling them in tell them they should learn to swim.

Netbeans done lost it's mind

So I opened NetBeans up for the first time in probably 3-4 days. I haven't performed any updates lately or made any other configuration changes since the last time I'd used NetBeans. But my effort to work on a java app was thwarted by the IDEs inability to find one of the major java libraries my project needed. And what library was that? org.jdesktop.application.SingleFrameApplication! WTF that's the class NetBeans extends when you use the Java single frame application template included in NetBeans. I looked around and saw that the jar file was included and existed on the file-system. I searched around google and came up fairly empty except for seeing a newer NetBeans had been released and decided upgrading would be the solution. Damn I hate taking the windows way out, but that's what happened.

Firefox and it's inability to jail plugins/extensions

I had high hopes for Firefox 3.5 after the talk of better control and behavior of plugins and extensions. This quickly turned to disappointment though as Firefox 3.5 hangs more than 3.0. Why can't Firefox successfully control the resource consumption of its plugins. But I guess I should just be happy that the flash plugins no longer trap all keyboard output.

Ubuntu the Vista of Linux

Well after a recent experience with Ubuntu and it's developers better understanding of how to manage my disk space than I do I declare it the Vista of linux. Any distribution that deletes files it doesn't maintain or require in /tmp for any reason has earns a place in hell right next to Windows Vista. Updating packages and rebooting doesn't require deleting data from /tmp.

Why does Ubuntu exist anyways? It's nothing more than a debian rip. Sounds like somebody thought they could invent a better wheel. These efforts should be concentrated on the core Debian distribution which actually has a chance at adoption in the enterprise. If Linux is going to gain any real traction in the marketplace this distro of the day has to stop and people need to focus on core functionality not cool fake transparent widgets. Get a working product then make it look cool.

Well time to find a new distro for the Netbook. Maybe someday Opensolaris will support the graphics driver and I can run a real OS on it.

Enterprise Linux Printing

In my office there are probably 600 linux desktops, plus with the global environment and collaborative effort we have to have all printers in the company published in our CUPS setups at each site. There are several sites of this size plus a few smaller ones, so needless to say there are a LOT of printers. I went to print a document today and jesus having to scroll through no less than 500 printers to find the one by me is brutal. Not to mention my company has no standard naming convention (not a linux issue) so 5 minutes later I give up and open remote desktop to print from windows. And before you say it yes I have my environment variables set, of course there's what 10 different ones these days that different applications use.

This is one place I must say Windows has it right. It pains me to say it with the abomination of a solution they usually deliver, but printing was so easy, there were just a few printers in the dialog box (ones I'd used previously). I just don't understand why with the great strides made on the Linux desktop over the past couple of years (thanks Ubuntu) that they can't fix printing.

Linux Gripes Introduction

I've started this blog as a place to express and vent my frustrations with Linux. If you're looking for something constructive you should move along now. I am an avid Linux user that works in a global environment with HPC clusters and desktops located at sites around the globe. This leads to a number of interesting challenges along with a lot of *headdesk* frustrations, and this will be a place mainly for the latter.