Re: What is going on?

Although annoying (agreed), it is very easy to see what is going wrong 
by running the same program from a terminal session (like 
gnome-terminal, konsole, xterm, etc.).  When you do so, you'll see lots 
of information about what is happening and more than likely the reason 
that something died.

The main problem with much unix documentation (delivered with distros) 
is that it is written to someone that already knows what is going on.  
So, it is more a summary than an explanation.  A way for experienced 
users to remember what flags do what.  To find more of a tutorial, 
you'll need to Google around.

Nat

Steven White wrote:

>Here is a submission for your Linux annoyances.
>
>I bought SUSE 7.3 Personal, installed it with basically no trouble, and
>started looking around at it.  I got the important stuff going, web
>browser, Star Office, email.  Eventually I started trying some of the
>other programs linked into the KDE start button.  
>
>Many times I would select something in the start menu, click it, see
>the mouse pointer turn into the "wait" indicator, and then...nothing. 
>No results, no screen, no error message.  It is very difficult for a
>novice to help himself with absolutely no hint about what might be
>wrong.
>
>If a program is going to be available on a GUI menu, then it should
>respond in some sort of GUI way.  If it a command-line program, that's
>fine, but there should be some indication that it is.  Maybe there
>should be, in the documentation for a distribution, a summary of all
>programs included in the distribution with some short explanation of
>what each does, where to find it, how to run it, where its documentation
>resides, and so on.
>
>In general terms, there seems to be some sort of implied unix
>philosophy that it is a good thing to beat one's head against a wall for
>a while to earn the right to use a computer.  That doesn't apply any
>more.  There is a lot of programming genius wasted and unappreciated
>because no one can figure out how to use the fruits of that genius.
>
>Steven White
>City of Bloomington
>2215 W Old Shakopee Rd
>Bloomington MN 55431-3096
>USA
>952-563-4882 (voice)
>952-563-4672 (fax)
>[email protected]
>_______________________________________________
>annoyances mailing list
>[email protected]
>http://michelangelo.renaissoft.com/mailman/listinfo/annoyances
>  
>

-- 
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Nat Ersoz             [email protected]  -o) 
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