.comment: The Desktop? The Desktop!

By: Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, July 18, 2001 09:00:48 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3623/1/

The Realm of the Unexpected

One thing that can't be denied about the Linux universe: It's never short of surprises.

Some of them are bad, as in the reports this week that gave rise to the mental image of a cartoon in which one William Gates III was dressed as an organ grinder, standing there grinding his organ and looking on approvingly as a little monkey danced and collected coins for him in a colorful tin cup. About which I have no more to say -- freedom means the ability to do whatever you want to do with anyone who will agree to do it with you, but it also means my ability to think of the whole enterprise as superfluous.

Some of them are good, such as what I found when I opened my latest build -- code from about a week ago -- of KWord. It is now not just usable but nice to use. It is not utterly complete, but as I write this in it I'm developing an affection for the thing. This is important. Here's why.

Time was, a word processor was either a word processor or Word Perfect, a fiendishly clever scheme whereby lawyers, who were just about the only ones who used it, could justify inflating their billable hours. ("You don't think it took 59 hours just to type up your will? Well, okay, you try to do it. Here's our word processor. Good luck.") There were a few advanced features, but nothing that couldn't be figured out by anyone bright enough not to end up dancing for Bill Gates. But word processors have grown far more complicated. They offer all kinds of things, often hidden in obscure places. Some actually require you to learn a programming language and cook up your own features.

This flexibility is on the whole laudable, but one of its side effects is that choosing a word processor has become a major commitment, because to take full advantage of it there's a lot to learn. KWord, in my view, has reached the level of development where it is now worthy of that commitment. Problem is, for the most part it doesn't really require that commitment. For instance, a moment ago I thought I'd take a look to see if there is a word count available, one feature out with which I cannot live. It was the very first place I looked (File > Statistics) and it worked.

(This isn't to say that there is nothing to learn, or that it does everything in a way that I like. The opening screen, which demands that a layout be chosen, is annoying to me, as is its inability to remember a zoom ratio. It would be great if one were able to establish a default format and zoom level and have KWord open to it when you click its icon -- when one sits down to write, it's writing, not working the controls of a word processor, that's in mind. It can always get prettified later.)

KWord, zoomed to 150 percent and entering text in Serifa-12 with anti-aliasing on and a screen resolution of 1600x1200 is just about as pleasant an experience as I've had since my days of DeScribe under OS/2. I'm starting to really like it, and have the feeling that it will be my word processor of choice until further notice. I'll write more about it when I've dug deeper into it, but for now I think it's safe to say that KWord is just about there.

As is most of KDE-2.2, based on the code I built last week. (The KDE-2.2 "hard freeze" went into effect Monday, so except for a little polishing it's pretty much done, with release scheduled for next month. It's perfectly usable right now. I should note that KOffice is not distributed as part of KDE itself, which means in practical terms that the two are on different release schedules.) The first things an upgrader will notice are a little blinking icon that attaches itself to the mouse pointer when an application is opened, designed to say that the application is enroute (I didn't like this at first, but have come either to like it or at least not to mind it as much), and a new and nifty file selection dialog which provides a preview of the document under consideration, which I like a great deal.

Gone, sadly, is Mosfet's Pixie image management system. I understand the things that led to its being withdrawn, but I liked it and grew used to it and am sorry that it's no longer there. Other users, I suspect, will agree.

A feature that KDE already has but doesn't exploit fully is one that I encountered this week when I built an application that doesn't make use of it.

The application is KOnCD (Did I get the capitalization right? Lemme check. Yup.), which is what seems to me to be the most advanced of the several KDE front ends for cdrecord. It's a nice app, and is or soon will be a likely choice for those looking for a KDE alternative to Xcdroast, which has become at GTK+ application. And it must be run as root.

As with current Xcdroast, setting the KOnCD executable UID does not allow mere users to use it; instead, it gives everyone an error message. There are of course ways around this, with wrappers or a special group, and these are things that one cannot expect someone new to Linux and KDE to want to dive into just to get the CD burner working. Nor is KOnCD the only KDE application that when installed shows up in everyone's menu even though only root can run it.

There's a simple solution, and I'm surprised it hasn't been utilized at the base desktop level. The K menu has an item, System > File Manager (Super User Mode), that produces a dialog which prompts the user for the superuser password (it will even save the password if you want; a Very Bad Idea, I think). There is a similar entry to open an su konsole, though I don't know why, because typing "su" and the password is easier than going traipsing through menus, and faster. The point is, everything is in place for a very elegant way of getting to applications that must be run as root. Why not make it part of the API for all apps that need root privileges or, if it's already documented, why are developers not using it? As it is, KOnCD is on my menu, but to use the thing I have to open a console, give X screen privileges to root, su root, then type "koncd." Kind of defeats the purpose of putting it on the menu, don'cha think?

Minor stuff. Pretty neat, really, when one can write 1,100 words about a new word processor and the worst things he can find about a beta desktop, and the phrase "crashes all the time" doesn't appear even once. Nor has KDE-2.2, in any of its development forms, crashed here. Even once.

Too Desktop?

Poor SuSE.

That worthy distribution has, through the lone fault of being a good, solid, product, been saddled with a fate it doesn't deserve: I use it, so when it annoys me I write about it, while other distributions, which would annoy me in different ways, get a pass. And here I go again.

I've noted previously that to bend SuSE-7.2 to my will as far as KDE is concerned meant deleting all the KDE-1.x stuff and replacing all the KDE-2.x stuff and QT. When I built the KDE CVS tree last week, I paid special attention to errors and set about resolving them. Here again SuSE made me cranky, though I suspect that the pablum packaged by just about everybody does the same irritating things.

Running the configure script for kdelibs sent me the error that I did not have OpenSSL installed. I do. The configure script for kdebase clued me in to my lack of CUPS, which I have installed, and OpenMotif, which I also have installed. Back to the CD (actually, back to the SuSE FTP site, which was easier than getting the CD out of the box on the shelf and mounting it) and the full-names directory, in which the packages are actually listed, instead of being sorted in ways that make no sense to me. Sure enough, each of these also had a -devel package.

It may be that in the market targeted by SuSE storage space is at a premium and therefore it's important not to install the whole thing when you install a package. I'm accustomed to building from source, and when you get source, you usually get the headers and so on. So to me the idea of splitting packages into little pieces performs no useful purpose, but to distributors (or at least SuSE) it's apparently a good thing to do. And for argument's sake I'll even grant them the point.

But if they're going to do this, then they are obligated, I think, to make it easy for users to check a single box, right up front, specifying that they want the -devel packages for every binary they install installed, too. Once there was source code, and if you wanted an application, you built it. Then there were package managers, which made life easier for newbies and for installation of distributions, though building from source was still considered acceptable, even preferable. Now distributions are making it hard for those who roll their own. There's no need for it, particularly with applications such as CheckInstall, which will even keep homebuilds from breaking the package management database. There is no reason that desktop and newbie friendliness must come at the expense of more experienced users or those of a little more adventurous spirit.

To this end, I was delighted by a long and highly instructive note I received from SuSE's Lenz Grimmer in response to my having written my impressions of the SuSE-7.2 distribution. Much of what he said was as I expected (the multiplicity of KDE directories is to ease the use of both KDE-1.x and KDE-2.x applications), some was very interesting (the reason for /var/X11R6 is to facilitate remote use with XFree-3.3.6), and one thing truly pleased me: The inflexibility of SuSEConfig is something that the company plans to change. I'd complained that if one changes some configuration files in /etc, SuSE changes them back. This encouraged me to believe that SuSE is both responsive and interested in having a broad variety of desktop users of different levels of skill in their user base.

(Other things that he explained: OpenGL is not enabled by default because it is often more trouble than it's worth, which is to say that it's not reliable yet; on reflection I looked back at the hoops I've had to jump through to make it work well -- compiling both agpgart.o and the DRI driver for my video card into the kernel itself, not as modules -- and realized that he's entirely right. IDE-SCSI emulation is not enabled by default in SuSE-7.2 because, while it works for many drives, it breaks many others, but a search of the docs, both packaged and online, will provide the recipe for setting it up. YaST2 relies on what monitors tell it about themselves -- often not much -- in assessing their capabilities. I replied, stating my hope that SuSE produces a document to ease the transition of users migrating to SuSE from other distributions.)

Speaking of other distributions.

I will receive several notes from Mandrake users in the next couple of days, all in defense of their choice. I am very glad that they are happy. Based on what they say, one who chooses Mandrake will not end up ruefully GNashing his or her teeth. It is by their accounts a fine distribution, and I have no cause to doubt them. But it is also a derivative distribution, of Red Hat, and as a friend said when asked if he would be an artificial insemination donor, why settle for the bottled stuff when you can get the real thing on tap? (Because it's friendlier to newbies?)

Caldera has, to my great sadness, breathed new life into the phrase "a day late and a dollar short." You can now order the Workstation 3.1 product or download ISO images and burn your own CDs for free. From what I have heard -- I have not seen it -- it's a nicely updated though austere version of the traditional Caldera Linux. And had Caldera's plans been made clear a month or two ago, there's a good chance that I, like many Caldera refugees who aren't, would be using it. But it's not something to which regular desktop users are likely to be drawn, and those users are not being sought by Caldera. These factors, combined with a licensing policy unique among distributions and some remarks by Caldera's Ransom Love that seemed designed to shoo away the general Linux user base, in any case mean that one of the oldest and best Linux distributions is no longer a player in the general desktop market. Too bad, though the company's reasons are understandable even if its way of going about it perhaps isn't.

Which in no way justifies yet another attack by the bloodsucking insects also known as plaintiffs lawyers, who have phonied up yet another investor lawsuit, this one against Caldera, its officers, and the underwriters of its initial public offering. It is highly likely that there are people at the underwriting investment banks who fully deserve to be strung up, but it's equally unlikely that Linux companies had anything to do with any real or imagined misdeeds, and it's completely certain that there is no abuse in the history of the planet that has been made right by enriching any bottom-feeding tort lawyer or group thereof, a class of parasite so odious that it makes Microsoft Corp. look positively charitable.

Plaintiffs lawyers. Oh, to see them, in little, colorful hats, dancing on the street and seeking coins from passersby.