Could we posibly make updating things any harder in linux? I mean realy. I would love it if I wasting entire days trying to make things work. Oh wait..I already am. I know some of you guys are not big fans of RPMs but I'm lovin them about now. I have had many things install just fine with them if they were packaged right. I have yet to ever I mean EVER compile and install something from the source. There is always something wrong and after researching it for hours I usaly find out that is beyond my ability to fix. I'm not totaly lacking in computer smarts but digital IQ just isn't high enough to handle some of the crap that gets thrown to me by this crasy little OS. The only constant in this place is that nothing ever works like they tell you it will. If any problem is ever answered by an FAQ I will be shocked. Why am I ranting? Odds are you don't care and cant help but I'll tell you anyway. First I thought Hey I need a scanner. Ok It sure would be nice if it worked under linux. So I look at their little known to work list and found one that is "Stable" that I could buy at the store. So I do. Plug it in and right away it knows what it is. Fantastic. So I scan and the system crashes. Not the nice everything is goofy kinda crashing but total lockdown, must hit reset button crash. I thought this was a difficult thing to make linux do yet here we have it. A few test and it would seam that it works great untill you scan something bigger than a index card. No talk about this anyware being a probem. Well as there is one newer version of sane I thought I could try it. With a little work it apeared to have installed. Yet I would seam that I am still running the older version. I cant find an old version hiding. The new one probably wont work but I would be good to try. So it looks like I've wasted the last 24 hours trying to make something happen thats not going to happen. Which isn't the first time. I have yet to get my two systems wired up together due to another rampant problem where there is so much damn information on something you cant figure out what actualy is importaint in your case. Then desperatly trying to figure out what all they asume you know in the first place. Ok rant over. I'm gona go cry now. Oh...Forget that part. [edited by - Goober King on July 31, 2003 3:53:27 PM]

No whitespace....brain exploding...eyes...bloodshot...can''t read...too...hard.......argh!

Int =)

I''m not sure what it is you want and I could''nt stand reading through that lack-of-whitespace-post, but try this.

http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

Yes, that''s pretty much too, I had the same problems for first 2-3 months of my Linux experience
The truth is there is no really good installer out there, RPMs kinda suck, they are very limited and not-so-stable. Probably your system never hang, it''s just X-Windows system, but as it has exclusive access to mouse+keyboard you couldn''t do anything. It this case I log thru ssh from my second box and just killall -9 X, but not everyone has 2 boxes. My problem ended when I started to compile stuff instead of using RPMs. But not everyone wants to compile, right? So this is ToDo issue.
Fortunatelly, I''m planning to start a new easy-to-use installer for linux, compatible with RPMs and with automated compilation of stuff, so IF THIS WORKS OUT this may really help with such problems.
Hope you get everything to work soon


darkone
Registered Linux User #317188

It gets really hard to read if you don''t put whitespaces. But anyway, one word: DEBIAN.

Victor.

The trick is to know what you''re doing. It takes time, but once you fully understand how things work it isn''t difficult or complicated anymore.

er, okay, i think i saw the words scanner, usb, crash, and wire up another system.

somebody REALLY needs to start selling a device the hooks up to your USB and serial port and saves everything that comes out of the serial port and lets you request it via the usb.... (powered by usb, too)

it''d SO own for crash dumps...

anyway, tried reporting this to your distro bugzilla?

I would say using a nicer tool like apt(debian), or emerge(gentoo) would first help you out in the long run, because they do better with dealing with dependancies than say, RPM, SuSE''s yast is ok, I guess, but not really good. pkg_get from freeBSD is kinda cool, but I don''t think it is quite as powerful as emerge personally.
Since I have 0 experience with debian, I can''t tell you how apt works, but I am sure it a better alternative compared to rpm-dependancy hell. For hardware stuff, I would refer to any sort of support forums that deal with that piece of hardware in linux, and make sure that either, 1. your kernel is built to handle the scanner, or 2. You have the kernel source on your computer(not a problem if you compiled it yourself.), then you can usually do a ''make install'' and it will build the module against the kernel, and then you can ''modprobe '', and it should work then. I hope this info helps.

Oh I got the scanner working. Turns out it was working out of the box. Just not under KDE. Didn''t find anything that said that could be a problem but it was for me. I was able to make many niffty scans without crashing. I still must have two versions of sane on my system. Its not hurting anything and I can always make uninstall the newer one thats not active.
I am often suprised how easy some stuff is and then how difficult others can be. As far as RPMs go I dont have anything against them. I wasn''t using them this time. They are the only thing I have ever had work in the last 2 years. They would probably work alot better if the people that packaged them were more thoughtful. When someone takes the time things aren''t that difficult. I''ve never had any problem with bought software that installs itself. I just never actualy found makeing from the source to actualy work. I think I got like one effect demo to work but thats it. Which is odd because its not like "./config, make, make install" is a hard thing to do.

the reason its hard is because most distributions tend to not install the -dev packages for various things.

slackware is very good for building applications like that because it doesn''t really break packages up into package and package-dev.

Some people like that, some people hate that. After all, its not THAT hard to just apt-get package-dev, but its another thing to deal with.