[Cbsupport] computerbank machine feedback

[John Simpson]

On 3/17/07, Russell jarvis <colouredstatic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Computerbank/Kylie,
>
> Thanks for information and advice about yum and alien. I am still going
> over it.
>
> The computer I purchased from CB is going very well, especially in terms
> of meeting my expectations.
>
> I am having a lot of problems with the computer but they are all self
> inflicted. None of them relate to reasons why I chose a CB computer.
>
> The software packages that were installed on the machine, did not reflect
> my needs or interests perfectly, but my needs and interests might not be
> typical of most clients. I think that overall the software selection
> achieves a good balance, and is as least as good as the medium automatic
> installs of Fedora, as about half of the software that I consider to be
> essential was there initially.
>
> It would have been good to have the emacs editor as well as vi, and I like
> maths programs such as, TeX, LaTeX, gnuplot and octave, but I am not sure
> how useful they are for the general population, who might be more interested
> in the multimedia and the internet.



>Russell we really don't need more than one commandline editor, and vim is
the one we know.
>Emacs adds a considerable amount of rubbish to the distro that we
don't need, and the 99% of our customers would never use. Same with
the other applications you mentioned. Our Distro is
>designed specifically with GUI Users with limited computer knowledge
in mind, not power linux users who are able to install their own
applications and configure them. As you mentioned most
>of our customers are more interested in the Multimedia, Office & Internet
side of the distro. However our distro is a good building point for adding
whatever you want.


I have never recompiled a kernel or anything like that, I wonder if the
kernel is already fine tuned for the hardware on the CB machines? I suspect
that it might be.

>> No its not fine tuned, its more a megakernel designed to run on as many
ix86/amd chipsets as we can, we can't afford to have different kernels
designed for different machines, its totally >unfeasable in the CBV
Situation. Remember, we use donated machinery from many different sources.


So anyway thanks for a good value computer.

>Your wlecome, we try our hardest to make sure our machines are useful
and great value and always get a warm fuzzy feeling when someone lets
us know we are doing a good job :)


BTW:
I wonder if there are going to be any training sessions in the weekends in
the Easter holidays (6th -15th of April). I guess you guys probably intend
on actually having a holiday which would be fair enough.

Here are more of my self induced problems if you would like to here about
them.

The first problem is getting all or some of Wine the menu to appear in the K
menu on the toolbar, I know that there are instructions as to how to create
desktop links in computer bank manual, but I think I need to somehow get the
program to put a menu there itself.

>> Yeah Wine can be a little bit of a pain to configure, though it normally
puts an icon into the kmenu on install


As when I installed Wine on my Gnome Fedora desktop, Wine seemed to install
a menu/interface in the F Applications part of the toolbar. The
menu/interface, seems to be a lot more transparent than the command line
options. Perhaps switching over to Gnome on the CB machine will remedy this,
which leads to my other problem:

I don't know how to switch over to the Gnome desktop, however it is very
much my own problem, since Kylie once gave me explicit instructions on how
to do it, and I lost/forgot them.

>> In your login screen, you can change it under options I think

Also I think I am close to getting my Canon ip 1000 printer to work through
localhost:631, but I am having problems. I understand that is a computer
that you neither stock nor recommend. Maybe I will ask about it some other
time.

>> Hmmm you might have to upgrade to cupsys 1.2.7 to get that working, if
you do add/upgrade everything you find for cupsys/gutenprint/foomatic except
-dev stuff, unless you intend working on >printer drivers :)
>You might also need to add a line to /etc/udev/permissions.rules
>If you do, type this,  vi /etc/udev/permissions.rules +/urandom
>Then add this line KERNEL=="lp0",          MODE="0666"



Thanks again
Russell

Hope you keep enjoying our distro

-- 
John Simpson

http://nighthawk.mine.nu/
"Quantum Physics: The dreams stuff is made of."
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