Probably stupid question, but

Tue Aug 27 18:28:18 UTC 2013

On Tuesday 27 August 2013 13:36:36 Liam Proven did opine:

> On 27 August 2013 18:18, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> > Liam, old habits are hard to break.
> 
> Life means growth. When an organism stops growing, it dies.

And sadly, at 78, that doesn't seem as far in the future as it did 60 years 
ago.  As I found out yesterday when I needed to change the right front tire 
on my rider and found I had nowhere near the muscle it took to wrestle the 
old, leaky china bowl tire off and the new one back on.  Without a helpful 
neighbor about 25 years younger who saw me struggling I would still be 
fighting with it.

> Grow. Learn.
> 
> > But when I
> > know the problem has been fixed by the vender
> 
> You do, do you? How? NB we are talking about Adobe Flash here, AIUI.

Restricting it to flash, no, I didn't know for sure.  But other packages, 
yes.  The tarball version of amanda I'm using here is years newer than 
whats available, and many packagers fail to understand amanda's security 
model, and do truly serious damage to it in bending it so the package 
manager of choice can install it.

There are other examples too, but how many amanda users are there on _this_ 
list.

> > but you, seemingly
> > representing the distro
> 
> What? WHAT?
> 
> I am *nothing* to do with Ubuntu, Canonical, or any other Linux
> company, vendor or anything else. I am here to offer free support in
> my own time and of my own voluntary effort. Nobody is paying me
> anything to do anything and I am not an employee of any company in any
> capacity,
> 
Sorry, anyone spending as much time here, doing support, would seem to have 
to have:

A: a means of support - somebody writing a paycheck, else its 100% a labor 
of love, and that doesn't buy the vittles or the shingles to keep you dry.

B: a few names in your address book so you CAN effectively serve as an 
intermediary between the concerned user, and the packaging people.

If not, you are spinning your wheels at similar rpms to mine.

> > don't even relay our needs back up the chain of
> > command
> 
> There isn't one. I work for myself. I have no boss.
> 
> Flash is in the repos. The package contains a script that downloads
> the latest version from Adobe and installs it automatically for you.
> That way, it gets updated when new versions comes out, automatically.
> 
> If you manually install it, this won't happen. You will be worse off.

Finally, knowing it was in a disabled repo, I enabled it and then updated 
my own copy which was stuck at 9.5.2.  More things play better now, so I 
thank you for that.
> 
> Gene, you have a long habit of doing things in nonstandard ways, of
> doing frankly rather foolish and misguided things with your systems,
> then complaining when stuff doesn't work.
> 
> E.g. running some ancient, outdated realtime kernel on an elderly
> version of the distro and then complaining when desktop stuff doesn't
> work. If you need a RT kernel for CAD/CAM work, fine, run the RT
> kernel on the CAD/CAM machine *BUT DON'T RUN DESKTOP APPS ON IT!*

Well, I haven't quite figured out why (booted to a 3.8.2 kernel ATM) the 
simulator mode will not run on a non-rtai kernel, so more & more if I want 
to write gcode from a comfortable chair as opposed to standing up at a 
keyboard thats about a foot too high, so an ssh -Y session seems the better 
way to do it.  Make sure the motor power is turned off, and run it on the 
real machine to test my latest "great new thing". ;-)

> Do the desktop/media stuff on a modern box with a modern release and
> keep the machinery-control box running whatever specialised code it
> needs /and nothing else./
> 
> You have been told this /repeatedly/ but you just tetchily object and
> complain.
> 
> Learn, already!
> 
> You are trying to go against the flow.
> 
> I am no spring chicken myself. I'm 45. I've been in this business over
> a quarter of a century.

I've been drawing a check, making electrons do useful work for better than 
60 years.  But only with the help of computers since about '80, so we 
aren't that far apart.

I wrote my first code for an RCA 1802 and built the rest of the hardware to 
control a broadcast VCR in the summer of '80 when I was the A.C.E. at KRCR-
TV in Redding CA, with only a machine code monitor for code entry in hex 
and to save the result to a cart machines tape.

Then I went on down the road, but that code was still in several times a 
day use in 1995, the last time I checked. 15 years is an eon in the 
broadcast business.

I left instructions as to how to patch it to compensate for newer tape 
machines with different ballistics, and I assume it was done or would have 
not been used by then.  It did a job that no commercially available machine 
could do.  I saw the beginnings of one at the NAB show in the Microtime 
booth in the spring of '81, and had to brag that mine was far ahead of 
theirs, describing what it could do.  Their lawyers were so paranoid about 
the IP even then, that by the time I walked back by an hour later to see if 
they wanted to make a production deal, that it had been removed from 
display and development canceled.  So you could stretch a point and say I 
have some longevity too. ;-)

> I am /more/ than old enough to have learned that trying to buck trends
> and fight against the way things work is stupid, pointless and a waste
> of time and effort.
> 
> You seem not to have learned this yet.
> 
> Well, learn it now. Learn from someone whose own beard is grey.
> 
> Flash is in the repos. Use that. Don't install your own; you will
> break things and be worse off.

Then why is that particular repo not enabled by default in the distribution 
/etc/apt/sources.list?  When I discovered it wasn't in the list synaptic 
was showing me, I did the next most obvious thing, went browsing and when 
the failure showed up, clicked the button. 99% of the new users will do 
that.

Sure, its nothing more than nuking the # sign in front of it, but first, 
the new user has to know enough about the system to be able to install a 
decent editor so he can nuke that #.  Then she will need to learn how to 
use sudo.  Something with a gui for control like gedit, instead of some 
teeny stripped thing that takes a long time to figure out how to use 
fluently.  You throw way too much too fast at the new user.

> Nothing is perfect. Everything has flaws and wrinkles. Learn them,
> learn how others work around them, and do the same. It makes life much
> easier and less stressful.

Agreed, but why is it so hard to find the fixes?

And FWIW, I don't waste $ on wrinkle creams, I am just enough overweight 
that they generally aren't a problem. Those that I do have I prefer to 
claim are badges of experience. :)  You might as well too. ;-)

Cheers, Gene
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