[Sussex] I hate gnome :P

[john]

Funny old game, this linux lark.

After making a total "pig's ear" of my mandrake install yesterday i.e. 
managing not to read the dialogue boxes, I managed to uninstall my kde3 
(somewhat stupidly, I might add).

Anyway, I figured I'd have a look at gnome, because lots of people around the 
linux world rave about it.

So after I eventually managed to get it installed, I started to have a play 
(bearing in mind my recent posts about configuring xine) and thought that as 
some of you had mentioned mplayer, I'd have a go at that as well.

The mplayer took for ever to download (about 4 hours), which confused me, 
because it's not more than a couple of megs in size.

When it finished, I found out why. Somehow, I'd manged to not only download 
mplayer and the various additional bit's for playing dvd's, but also a live 
distro that I'd never heard of before, called PCLinuxOS 2k4. Which is 
apparently based on mandrake 9.2 (I seem to recall that it's been put 
together by "Texstar", and I must have got "click happy" while I was trying 
to get my update and install sources for mending my mandrake install - 
texstar was one of the sources that I used to include, because he used to do 
a neat line in modified mandrake packages - usually more up to date than 
mandrake themselves).

So it's sort of panned out reasonably OK, because I didn't have to do much to 
the mplayer install to get it playing a dvd reasonably well - though one of 
the minor frustrations that I found was that the "frontend" for xine is 
better looking visually and more intuitive (IMO), but mplayer seems to do 
configuring type stuff better (automatically? maybe just better hardware 
detection? I don't know) - the mplayer control panel thingy kept getting 
covered by the playing picture screen, and didn't want to stay in the same 
place (again, maybe I've got something set wrongly).

In the end, I just said bollocks to it and booted back into XP and watched the 
disc with windvd - less stress.

But then when it came to playing with gnome and getting the live distro 
burned, that's where I lost it.

I figured I'd try a couple of customisations with the gnome, but was 
disappointed that there's nowhere near as many additional backgrounds, icon 
set's etc for gnome as there is for kde. Also, for the life of me, I couldn't 
find out how I make it, so the gnome opens apps, using desktop icon's with "a 
single click" facility. Sure, if the icon is a taskbar one, then one click 
and off you go, but the rest of the desktop icons seem to need a double 
click.

Then it came to configuring e-mail. As all the gnome users out there would 
know, gnome seems to come with evolution. So click on that, and follow the 
setup routine, then ZILCH. Whats wrong thinks me so I try to edit the profile 
for my e-mail account, and still zilch. It seems that it's something to do 
with my using pipex, which gives me a user name, password etc but I have to 
use an "email alias" so my email address isn't something incomprehensible and 
hard to remember. Evolution doesn't seem to like that. What a pile of pooh! 
Fortunately I'd managed to install mozilla during the gnome install, and 
thank god for that, because it must have installed mozilla mail. 

Some of you might sit back and smirk, thinking what an idiot (you'd be 
right!), but as I've always used kmail, which seems infinitely easier to the 
"uninitiated", these minor differences could easily make the difference 
between n00b's adopting linux systems and saying bollox, it's too much hard 
work.

Then there's the cd burn that I tried to do. Previously, I've used K3b, which 
has seemed to be a straight forward, easily managed app to use, with 
excellent result's. I should say that I can only really compare it to 
"burning nero", that came with the pc when I bought it.

The gnome install seems to have Gcombust, Nautilus CD burner and another one 
that I can't recall the name of.  If I try them I either get dialogue boxes 
telling me what I haven't done i.e. copied a file from a to b, or maybe done 
something with setup. But I haven't managed to find anything that is even 
vaguely like instructions for use. I even tried installing X-CD-Roast, to 
have a look at that, but end up with yet another dialogue box that just says 
a load of stuff that I haven't got a clue about.

The only thing that these event's seem to have taught me, is to stick with 
what you know. I'll keep playing with the gnome for a while, but suspect that 
I'll end up dumping it in favour of KDE 3.2 when it's released (next 
month??).

Oh well, I suppose that I'd better get off this soap box so I can break it up 
for kindeling to light the fire.

regards

John D.

p.s. I'm presuming that this month's Moot is next thursday (i.e. the 29th) in 
the usual place ?????