[Gllug] Re: linux on the Desktop

[Nix]

On 13 Feb 2007, Christopher Currie verbalised:
> On e: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:25:08 +0000 Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> wrote:
>> [Cc:ed to the author]
>
> He'll presumably revise his piece to take account of your comments, as he has 
> with others'.

That's the idea :)

> Butthe piece is the sort of thing that ordinary desktop users should have 
> their attention drawn to and don't.

Quite so!

> I tried (following a link from Chris Spackman's piece) Virtual Dimension, a 
> FOSS multiple desktop utility for Windows. 

I'm using sDesk (GPLed) at work at the moment. Its biggest problem is
that it never restores focus correctly, leading to horrible mouse
banging :( but annoying though it is, it's better than nothing.

> It works well, except for the purpose I got it for: maneageably to edit two 
> copies at the same time of our wonderful content-management database 
> (editable with IE6 only, of course).

Naturally, just like our awful slower than death timesheet program. (I
have my own, based on John Wiegley's timeclock.el, but I still have to
transfer the data across every week, *sigh*.)

> [Since, for example, to link from one page to another you have to navigate 
> away from the page you're working on, find the other page, select a 
> particular tab, add an 'inpoint', save it, copy the reference and turn it 
> into a URL,navigate back to the other page, click on an icon to bring up a 
> link window, insert URL.. and at every operation the screen redraws, needing 
> more scrolling...]

Gaaaah. Who *designed* that system? That's worse than any other CMS I've
ever heard of.

> The database software occasionally brings up a pop-up window for certain 
> functions, and when that happens the second and any other copies of IE are 
> killed, whether I'm using Virtual Dimension or not. 

That sounds like the db software is explicitly killing them. Just the
sort of crud I've come to expect from what I'm sure is proprietary
software... (not that free software is perfect by any means, but at least
we can fix annoying bugs.)

> Interestingly, that fenestracide doesn't happen with two separate IE6 windows 
> running in Wine, under KDE..... It must be a specifically Windows-related 
> bug.

Are they two windows started via the `new window' menu option, or two
started by clicking on the IE icon? In typical Windows fashion although
these look the same they're quite different internally: the first starts
two windows on the same browser instance, the second starts two instances,
with two separate processes backing them.

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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