I've had enough of Debian. I want it GONE, NOW. Apple, where's my damn powerbook?
I have been running Debian GNU/Linux for several years now. The rationale behind using it is that keeping it up-to-date is really easy (apt-get update;apt-get upgrade), it's rock solid in comparison to Windows, and when it does go wrong, it's possible to track down and fix the problem.
Yesterday I removed the jetty debian package, since I use the version of jetty bundled with Cocoon. Having two copies running eats up valuable memory. During the process of removing jetty, I also did an upgrade to make sure various security fixes were in place.
Afterwards, my desktop started misbehaving: various programs wouldn't start (including the calculator crashing ... I mean come on, the calculator? Please! How hard is it to have a working calculator?!?!). So, I restarted X. Except X wouldn't restart, it failed to run the window manager 5 times and then bluescreened - I kid you not - saying X had been disabled.
It turns out the problem seems to have been a dodgy font. fontconfig was crashing when trying to rebuild my font directories - when I removed an offending directory, it was fine. I finally got my desktop back up and running this morning.
But now mozilla doesn't want to work. It hangs on startup, an strace reports it's repeatedly calling gettimeofday. So I had no browser, until I reinstalled galeon and imported all my bookmarks. It looks horrible, with no anti-aliased fonts, but hell, I'm just happy to have a working browser at this point.
And, just to add that extra bit of entertainment, my apache web server configuration got trashed, too. I'm always nervous when a new Apache package comes down the line, because Apache's automagical configuration routine NEVER gets it right. So I keep backups of the key files. Lots of them. But still:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU DEBIAN PEOPLE?
DO NOT OVERWRITE MY CONFIGURATION FILES OR I WILL CARVE YOUR EYES OUT WITH A BLUNT SPOON.
They seem to have split httpd.conf into httpd.conf and modules.conf, which seems like a good idea.
But the change broke which page is loaded as the default one, meaning suddenly instead of web pages I'm getting directory indexes. Hello? Security hole!
Apache's URL rewriting also seems broken in some obscure way ... I haven't worked out what has happened yet, but it's stopped images being served from the site I'm working on at the moment.
All I want is for my laptop to just work, to get out of my way and let me get on with the mountain of things I need to do. Looks like this one is a dead duck, so I'm going to switch a few days early and use the spare iBook we have floating around.
I feel a bit better now I've got that rant out of my system. Better to shout and scream here than to go find a Debian developer and beat him to death with a baseball bat, eh?
Update: From The Register: PC rage turns the air blue ... likely to have an extreme reaction to computer-induced stress, including "swearing, shouting and even violence" ... check, check, check.
Posted by savs at October 21, 2003 2:55 PM