Gnome-Centrism at the Kubuntu Wiki

[askrieger]

There have been a number of people on this site who have reported problems with mounting and auto-mounting various devices. In order to try to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, I went over to the KUBUNTU WIKI (remember that name) site. I searched on hald in text. The second entry, a page entitled "DebuggingRemovableDevices" looked promising. So I clicked it. I quote:

1. disconnect the device
2. killall gnome-volume-manager
3.
In Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) and older
* gnome-volume-manager 2>&1 | tee gvm.log
In Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) :
o gnome-volume-manager -n 2>&1 | tee gvm.log
etc

Remeber the name of that official Kubuntu site. WTF! How do I explain to some guy who installed Dapper last week and can't find his camera, PDA, flash drive, etc. that the good folks at Canonical didn't bother to take the trouble to figure out that KDE doesn't use gnome-volume-manager?

By the way, what IS the KDE equivalent. ivman?

[claydoh]

Re: Gnome-Centrism at the Kubuntu Wiki

It's not ivman, I know that much (it is not installed in dapper), but I am not sure what part of KDE does this, I think it may talk directly to udev and or hal, but I might be wrong. KSysGuard doesn't show any specific process that show up when I plug in my usb flash drive other than something called "usb-storage". I would suggest trying the steps listed, but skip over the gnome stuff, then maybe edit the wiki entry it is just a mirror of the same page in Ubuntu's wiki

[Fenyx]

Re: Gnome-Centrism at the Kubuntu Wiki

I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but...

For all the good things that Ubuntu/Kubuntu has, it has a very poor and disorganized documentation system. And this for both documentation (manual) and wiki (help/tips/tutorials). There also seems to be some inconsistency of which should go where, or if it should go anywhere at all. We have a Kubuntu Wiki on the Kubuntu site, but the Kubuntu wiki also includes instructions for Ubuntu. On the other hand, help.ubuntu.com sometimes have instructions for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu, and sometimes Ubuntu only (take the case of the BinaryHowto).

The forums and the IRC has, thus, become the primary source of support for Desktop users. Server users probably opt for the commercial support offered by Ubuntu/Canonical.

While the community support is great, I don't think they should leave out or underestimate the value of documentation, both offline and online. I think very few people are involved in documentation right now...

[askrieger]

Re: Gnome-Centrism at the Kubuntu Wiki

For all the good things that Ubuntu/Kubuntu has, it has a very poor and disorganized documentation system.

Unfortunately, that is characteristic of Debian based distros. Take a look at /usr/share/doc/<almost-anything>. You will always find a copyright (usually the same one with only the names of the authors changed). You will often find a changelog (telling you that some problem you never heard of was fixed seven minor releases ago). You will sometimes find a README (usually less than 1 kB in length). Other than that it's RTFM.

If I were as rich as Mark Shuttleworth I'd hire a bunch of technical writers to generate the missing manuals. Obviously, this problem is not unique to (K)Ubuntu. If it were there wouldn't be a series of books entitled "XXXX, The Missing Manual. I just got thoroughly ticked off at the frustration of finding a web page on the KUBUNTU wiki, with a title that sounds totally apropos to the subject at hand,but turns out to start with advice on getting an error message from gnome-volume-manager. It's four hours later and I'm still simmering, if no longer steaming.

[Fenyx]

Re: Gnome-Centrism at the Kubuntu Wiki

Heck, I even think that this is characteristic of most FOSS products. The problem is that the people who are supposed to be know the product well enough (developers) are not that interested or too busy to write a documentation that would be understood by us mere mortals. That's why I think that for every big free/open source project, besides developers/programmers there should also be usability experts and documentation teams. Unless of course, some developers have the ability to do all three, a unique, but certainly possible, scenario.

You should drop by the IRC Kubuntu channel (#kubuntu) and see how many times the wiki for installing binary drivers is mentioned when someone asks about how to install ATI/NVIDIA drivers. Then if you follow the link, it says something like "at the top of the screen click on System then Administration..."

[off-topic]
If I were a rich as Mark, I would be really hiring more developers for Kubuntu to optimize its speed and performance. I don't believe that KDE is slower than GNOME by nature, because SimplyMEPIS is faster or just as fast as Ubuntu, but sadly, both are really faster than Kubuntu...
[/off-topic]