dstiles - 9:48 pm on Mar 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

graeme_p - rar/unrar: my comment was, really, that it would be nice it Terminal apps were in a menu to make them easy to find. I was expecting one or the other to be GUI but I can handle the few occassions on the command line.

I have installed perhaps ten apps this year. Most worked fine. I haven't reported bugs because I haven't yet tracked down what's (not) happening. Basically, if it doesn't work out of the box I find something else or go back to Windows - it's quicker. Also, looking at "support" forums for SOME specific tools, there is a tendency to reiterate standard "this'll fix it" solutions without actually reading the real problem. That isn't exclusive to linux, though: Windows is much the same but with more annoyingly duplicated forums.

And, of course, because the failed ones haven't gone into any kind of menu I have no record of what I installed apart from synaptic: my memory really is poor for that kind of thing.

One added to the Menu was usbview. It says it cannot see the /proc/bus/usb/devices file (which does not exist) and suggests compiling usb etc. USB works fine and since the original problem was solved by other means it's no longer urgent and I've just ignored it. My expectation as a programmer would be that the tool would offer to fix its own problems.

The usbutils package, installed at the same time, doesn't show anywhere and my only record of it is in the synaptic manager.

I should make it clear that all the major programs work pretty much out of the box, allowing for setting up the various configs in tool menus etc, and work very well.

My quibbles are with small utilities with which I am trying to improve my working environment: rar because it's very good, I've always used it on windows and now I need to unpack the archives onto linux; dns-browse, gresolver and similar because net-tools lacks dig, which I'm used to on Sam Spade, and linux dig isn't GUI; printer ink level detectors that work on every printer except mine; that sort of thing.