Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 01:07:35 +0000 From: Mark Valentine <mark@valentine.me.uk> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSDCon photos Message-ID: <200309230007.h8N07Z9d026445@dotar.thuvia.org> In-Reply-To: <20030922194907.GA11177@online.fr>
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> From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> > Date: Mon 22 Sep, 2003 > Subject: Re: BSDCon photos > People still use netscape 4? Why? Believe me, I'd love to get away from it! Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be so easy for me to do so. Netscape 4 is just the least painful alternative I've come upon. It installs easily in my environment and more or less runs at reasonable speed for a while before it bombs out. I keep JavaScript turned on largely because for some stupid reason disabling it seems to lose some CSS functionality (or something to the same effect)! Last time I tried Opera it was at least as flaky and just, well, weird. Maybe I should give it another try, it's been about a year. (Footnote: installed Opera 6.12 [static] and it seems to run reasonably - didn't drop core until I exited; anyway, it looks like I can now configure it into something not too wasteful of screen space - apart from that banner ad - so I'll give it a spin for a while.) I once had Mozilla running but it was just too darned sluggish to be useful (this computer may be a few years old, but I still think that any software which doesn't run well on a well-spec'd 600MHz Pentium III system is just not worth my time!). I recently managed to build Mozilla Firebird (which appears my best hope at the moment, though I don't hold out too much hope for interactive performance), but it just bombed out with a run-time link error which I haven't yet resolved (I clearly don't have the dependencies built quite right - these things shouldn't be so _hard_ and _time consuming_ for someone who's been building and using free software heavily for two decades!). I can't yet use FreeBSD's pre-built binary packages on this system because they hose my /usr/local (a long standing gripe of mine; for just a few packages which don't conflict with my existing installation I can rip apart the packages and install them by hand, but that gets tiresome quickly), and when I try to build from ports my existing non-ports components seem to cause grief. Another avenue I've still to get around to exploring is to build the ports on another "clean" system with LOCALBASE != /usr/local and install the resulting packages on this one - I think I just managed to free up a system adequate for that purpose. I suspect conflicts in dynamic libraries will still cause grief and possibly hose the stuff I _do_ have running... :-( ldconfig(8) is not my friend. I gave up trying to build either KDE or GNOME myself after a few dozen packages - it'll be easier to just clear out /usr/local (therefore abandoning a local software admin regime which has served me well all these years, but this is the last system I have which still uses it) and start again from ports, but this migration takes (too much) time (I'm going to attempt, for example, to move my news system over to another of my FreeBSD systems and use the inn port instead of my own installation - ditto for samba and apache - but I can't install ports on _this_ system until practically every last "legacy" [ahem] component is moved from /usr/local). I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old, but I still rely heavily on the lightning fast virtual desktop switching of olvwm, the familiar Mail-meets-vi feel of mush for mail and the incomparable efficiency of trn. All of these are missing modern features, but I'll live without these features if having them means foregoing the excellent implementations of core functionality I'm used to depending on minute by minute, day by day. Cheers, Mark. -- "Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." "We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* -- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com>;
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