Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:46:27 -0500 From: Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus@marcuscom.com> To: "Steiner, Bernard" <Bernard.Steiner@lahmeyer.de> Cc: freebsd-gnome@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GNOME's newbiew woes and rantings Message-ID: <1201034787.54891.33.camel@shumai.marcuscom.com> In-Reply-To: <0E3C8932B8AFFF4294C69ABF71FB23656171C5@ZDEXV001.lahmeyer.com> References: <0E3C8932B8AFFF4294C69ABF71FB23656171C5@ZDEXV001.lahmeyer.com>
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--=-tBmtxMPrMLSFCR7jL0Bt Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 12:57 +0100, Steiner, Bernard wrote: > Dear GNOME, > I would like to tell you a story about what happens when a seasoned non-c= ombatant BSD veteran tries and installs GNOME: >=20 > In the beginning, I got 386bsd release 0.0 which was a pain to install on= an ESDI drive because it only supported one floppy drive and one hard disk= and refused to boot off the ESDI drive. > This eventually got patched and 0.1 would let me boot off my beloved ESDI= drive. > There were no further patches to 0.1, so eventually I installed FreeBSD (= though I admit that memory fails me > as to whether that was 1.X or 2.X). Ever since then have I managed to upg= rade my system from source, > so currently it runs 6.3-PRERELEASE (I track -STABLE). >=20 > The system is now an AMD64 and indeed it runs X11. > Sound runs wonderfully, DVD playback works, etc. >=20 > So I decided now was the time to take a step forward and grabbed GNOME fr= om ports. > This seems to have been a big mistake: > There appear to be not many manual pages worth mentioning. > Some processes (of which I am not sure what they are supposed to be doing= ) seem to grab a CPU > and just increase its core temperature as a CPUhog. > Some processes SEGV on me straight away (abiword, some screen savers, and= others which I haven't the foggiest idea what they are supposed to do). Th= e number of *.core files I got since I started on GNOME simply amazes me. > Sometimes the system just freezes. And, yes, it is not just the screen bu= t also network IO is no longer possible > which really bothers me because then my nice gmirror disks are un-synced = and also need an fsck so the next time the system boots it takes about an h= our to get past fsck and gmirror re-sync. >=20 > I am very unhappy with this. >=20 > Methinks I am missing something very basic and fundamental here. I just c= annot begin to assume that anybody would even consider using GNOME if it re= ally were as buggy as that. >=20 > So I went to have a look at the FreeBSD=B4s GNOME how-to, and I must admi= t there's not an awful lot there that might help me get this mess sorted ou= t. Nor is the GNOME site helpful in any way. >=20 > Should I re-compile the whole lot with -g -bstatic and start a serious gd= b session ? >=20 > Where should I start looking ? The instructions at http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/bugging.html gives you all the information you will need to report a problem with GNOME on FreeBSD. If you are seeing crashes, then you will need to rebuild some ports with debugging symbols to get useful backtraces. But it also sounds like you're seeing kernel panics which means you will need to rebuild the kernel with debugging support, and report those problems to the stable@ list. That said, I run GNOME on amd64 (as do a few other users), and I don't have the problems you're describing. There was a recent bug in AbiWord on amd64 that I fixed which caused it to crash at startup. As far as I know AbiWord has since been working for people on amd64. Joe --=20 PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc --=-tBmtxMPrMLSFCR7jL0Bt Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (FreeBSD) iEYEABECAAYFAkeWViMACgkQb2iPiv4Uz4c7mwCeOSbbPVKgV7QCo1KMaaKG26uO OJoAn0XBY3B5G93kDtmfcFxVjBIzDpgO =pDOO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-tBmtxMPrMLSFCR7jL0Bt--
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