Vakkotaur

I thought the backup that I was running was taking a long time. I even wondered if I'd mistakenly connected the external hard drive by USB (belgian only has USB 1.1) rather than FireWire. Checking on things, /home was around 47G. My reaction was, I have 47G of stuff?!? Sometime this morning the backup stalled.

In looking things over, the .Trash directory where allegedly deleted files go was not empty. It's not that I hadn't emptied the trash. I did that right before starting the backup, or so I thought. But evidently the actions I took only made it look like it had been emptied. And evidently this deceit had been going on for some time. After really deleting the files, there's only about 14G to back up. That's much more reasonable.

The backup will still take a while and I don't expect to be installing Fedora until tomorrow night at the earliest, but now I have one more reason to do so.

Recently xchat 2.6.0 was released. I waited a few days, mainly as I forgot about it, but finally had enough with xchat 2.4.x crashing on DCC send and sometimes on receive as well. There is a Fedora Core package, and source is available as well. There are links to other sites that have packages for other distributions.

The site for the Mandrake, well Mandriva now package, only has stuff for the most recent release. Nothing for those who are not keeping up with the bleeding edge. So it looked like compiling was what was needed. The instructions were simple... the actions, not so much. A consistent failure from GTK+ not being found, then not being new enough. Chances are upgrading GTK+ will cause a "dependency cascade"... and so that is where I stopped.

Looking through xchat's forums, someone made a Slackware package and I installed that on caspian where it's been running for several hours. And unlike 2.4.x it can DCC even after several hours of uptime. On another page I found suggestion of how to install a Slackware package on a non-Slackware system. It only almost works, dagnabbit. The bad part of that is that I then lost the working (though buggy) xchat. Removing it and re-installing older version ran smack into more dependency problems. It's starting to remind me of Windows and that should not be happening. Meanwhile I'm discovering just how screwy KSirc is. It's a backup, not a primary program by any means.

I resumed my search for a Mandrake package of xchat 2.6.0 and I actually found one. But it came with its own dependency cascade. It didn't look too bad, only two packages needed, but the first needed something else. That something I can find a reference to, but the site is, hopefully only temporarily, inaccessible. I haven't even bothered trying to get the second of the listed packages needed.

This is quite annoying. Everything else has been working fine for a while now and I finally have Mandrake 10.1 and my preferred programs working right, save for xchat. It should be a matter of upgrading a single package and Just Working. But instead it's this nuisance.

The Ultima (Slackware) system Just Worked. But Slackware's package management is... minimal. Yet RPM seems to not quite enough. I've caught myself pondering Slackware (as it seems to just work), Gentoo, and FreeBSD (as each has a package management system that handles dependencies). I've thought a bit about Fedora, and I'm not sure if I'd really gain anything by going that route. I should not need to switch distributions just to get one program to work right, or at all. Though I have been thinking about moving away from Mandrake, I'd rather it happen on my terms.

Windows Explorer in XP, or whatever XP calls the file manager, is trying to be helpful. That means it is really being annoying. On the desktop is a shortcut for "Documents" that opens the file manager to a documents directory. This directory is, however, not the one I really want. I want C:\home\neubauer instead.

I figured I'd just change the shortcut and give it the properties I want. It almost worked. It will give me direct access to C:\home\neubauer\ BUT that's now seemingly a ghost of the real thing. I'm not really there in the directory tree where I can, if I want to, easily jump to another directory, like C:\usr\bin or some other that I want to get to fast from time to time.

Instead of doing what I want, the system is trying to guess what I need and getting it wrong. It wants to be helpful in the worst way. And it is that: helpful in the worst way. I don't want this incompetent help. I want it to get out of my way. The Win95 box's Windows Explorer comes up at C: and shows the whole directory tree. That is acceptable. At least I can navigate directly from there without having to go through the extra step of clicking a "Folders" button. Even Windows 2000 got it right. But XP just had to go improve things the Microsoft way. The result: it sucks.

I've put up with this silly XP behavior for a few weeks now and my patience is running out. Anyone know how, or even if, the XP file manager can be whacked into doing the right thing? I haven't looked into replacement file managers just yet, but it may come to that.