RHEL5 clones are making me mad, mad, mad!
Now I know why CentOS can’t upgrade its XFCE from Extras:
This is the binary installer for XFCE 4.6.0, because there isn’t any for 4.6.1 as of yet, and it can’t install because in EL5 gtk-doc is 1.7 < 1.10. Holy shit. XFCE 4.6.x can’t run on EL5. What a pile of shit… EL5!
Another annoyance is that my X session crashed one more time in relation to multimedia. Some time ago it crashed when I inserted a DVD and I tried to used VLC to play it (because no matter what I tried, Totem can’t play DVDs in EL5); upon restarting X, the DVD was able to play smoothly, but for the price of crashing X. Today, my X crashed when I right-clicked on an AVI file and I told it to play with one of the media players, I guess it was Kaffeine, but this is not relevant; after restarting X and Kaffeine, opening the file made it play flawlessly.
I wish to the developers of the Intel video drivers for Linux to burn in Hell, after having been torn in many pieces by hungry vultures! There is nothing wrong in the hardware, because it doesn’t crash Windows; but it crashes X on occasions.
A last annoyance with EL5 is the need for me to periodically «killall npviewer.bin». That’s because I normally want to be able to view all the Flash content I might encounter, hence I use the Adobe Flash plugin into the moronic Firefox. That makes two more piles of shit: one from Adobe, and the other one from Mozilla.
I should do something to preserve what was left out of my nervous system. Expect Odiecolon.repo to be frozen soon, I’m losing interest in hacking EL5 clones…
Sep 1, 2009 at 03:05
> "Expect Odiecolon.repo to be frozen soon, I’m losing interest in hacking EL5 clones…"
Those who use Odiecolon for their greater good and fun hope you will not abandon it, please…
Sep 1, 2009 at 03:36
Oh noes!!
Why mess with XFCE?
I'm still a happy Centos+Gnome user, but this I managed through not scratching that itch in my arse to have all sorts of different and _newer_ software.
You don't really need newer software, do you?
Sep 1, 2009 at 04:32
it's about time.
i was going to recommend suse (on dvd, not livecd) because it is quite satisfactory for me, but alas, now it is only supported for 18 months, just about the same as regular ubuntu.
i guess if you still interested in linux for longer term, ubuntu lts is the only viable choice for now. sure it has some problem with hibernation, but at least it doesn't drain your energy that much from all the hacking and repo managing.
Sep 1, 2009 at 09:41
Is this a joke? I mean it's a freakin' documentation package, why can't it be safely ignored? Why isn't it labelled "recommended/optional" instead of "mandatory"?
Linux, the land of choice and modularisation.
Sep 1, 2009 at 09:58
@Hal:
But most packages aren’t upgradeable — they’re the latest versions that build with the obsolete EL5 libs. Of course, there are many libs only needed as dependencies, but I’m not going to track all the possible ‘vulnerabilities’ in a library I only use for a media player! Finally, there are a few applications that worth an upgrade, such as Sylpheed 2.7.1, likely to be incremented in the future *and* newer versions likely to build under EL5. Overall though, Odiecolon.repo is not supposed to be a very dynamic repo anyway.
—
@Lucian:
Speaking about newer software, I have to say that Microsoft Office 2007 is a piece of marvel, having the most brilliant equation editor ever! And Microsoft Office 2010 will support LaTeX! In the meantime, OpenOffice.org 3.1 (and 3.0, 2.4) is a huge pile of shit, with severe usability bugs (e.g. I have to set the page from Letter to A4 for each and every new document), barely matching *in part* the functionality of Microsoft Office 2000.
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@Arturi:
openSUSE vs. Ubuntu LTS? Well, *buntu 9.10 sports the *new* Intel video framework, maybe it would get stable sometime soon…
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@everyone:
And I have not counted the… countless number of applications that simply don’t build under EL5: they don’t have “old enough” versions that build with the libs from EL5!
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@zugu:
“gtk-doc is a tool for generating API reference documentation. It is used for generating the documentation for GTK+, GLib and GNOME.”
Sep 1, 2009 at 14:48
Even more reason for labelling the package as "dev only", I can hardly imagine users diving into the API and generating documentation. It's an arcane tool and the Xfce desktop should not depend on it. What is wrong with people nowadays?
Sep 1, 2009 at 21:25
You guys should simply switch to Debian (Stable or Testing, depending on your taste) or Ubuntu (LTS or regular)… I guess we all did the RHEL experiment… We went, we saw, we learned…
Personally I am quite happy with Jaunty… Those with Intel drivers issues could just use Hardy… Or Debian Stable…
Sep 1, 2009 at 23:51
@ Caraibes
Béranger, thank you for the reply and I agree with you, but Odiecolon is partly what prompted me to use a RHEL clone on my desktop, with the Kiki Novak book "Linux aux petits oignons". In his book, Mr Novak uses RPMForge but I'm not sure to have a great confidence in the other third-party repos, except maybe for EPEL, so Odiecolon is for me a "windfall" (une aubaine in French), if you see what I want to say… So thank you very much for Odiecolon.
In fact, maybe one of the last little things missed in Odiecolon, even if we don't want "another Ubuntu" ;-), is a video editor. We have something for Audio (Audacity, Sweep), something for images (Gimp), so why not something for video like e.g. Avidemux, Kino, Cinelerra (I do not know which is better or more interesting to have)? I don't know if they can build on CentOS 5 but the repo should be almost complete after this possible addition.
After these good words, thanks again for your work and have a good night!
Sep 2, 2009 at 01:21
@ Hal
I understand… I still have CentOS installed, but find it to lack so many things, and so slow to boot, that I don't boot it anymore…
I learned a lot while reading Kiki Novak. I recommend his book to anyone.
But I simply believe Debian (or other Debian based distro) is the best for me (and I guess for a bunch of other users, but I can't speak for them…)
Sep 2, 2009 at 04:52
well it's a slow period for linux anyway.
we could all just wait for november to come.
Sep 2, 2009 at 09:19
@HAL:
I should be able to test Cinelerra 2.1 tonight. Cinelerra 4 requires some dependencies that won't build under EL5 in the required versions.
Sep 2, 2009 at 22:14
Ok, so you've decided for Cinelerra(-CV probably?), good.
Sep 3, 2009 at 00:17
I am terribly disappointed by Cinelerra 2.1CV — it's horrendous! So I am *not* adding it.
You can find a version at RPMforge, should you want one.
Sep 3, 2009 at 01:15
> "it's horrendous!"
Ah? In what sense?
And what about Avidemux for example? It's not so "complete" than Cinelerra but it doesn't seem bad, well, I guess…
Sep 3, 2009 at 16:14
I am too depressed to add any new package to Odiecolon.repo…