Linux Adventures Reloaded!

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KDE admits to having "QA" issues (both it and Gnome have their brokennesses).

My only guess would be that, however the WM protocol... or the WM itself, but the taskbar is a separate process in the KDE system, right?... communicates to the taskbar app (something I'd have to look up, and... that shouldn't really be rocket science, every WM has to be aware of its managed windows), perhaps it's trying to do a DNS lookup for localhost, or preferring to try IPv6 sockets that might be unavailable or firewalled incorrectly, before those attempts time out and fall back to whatever lets it work at all.

Or it could just be an old version of Freetype (or an old X server without accellerated or optimized XRender?) burning CPU to antialias text in the taskbar, or something completely different.

[Floid]

The thing I remember about really old versions of Gnome was that it expected the local hostname to resolve before it could get anything done... which for all I know, might even work 'seamlessly' on a Linux system with whatever resolver library's linked there, but on BSD, it induced about a 50-second wait at startup before anything could be done at all.  (Obviously installing tinydns would've been a quick fix, but at the time, I didn't know what the hell I was doing yet.)

Bluntly, both are Really Big Environments, and just like MacOS or Windows, they suffer the same problems.  The upshot is that things like twm, AmiWM or even XFCE are available and 'supported' just as well as the big offerings.  (Well, if you want dock or tray apps, you need to pick something subscribing to one of the major dock or tray standard(s) around.)

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lame_duck wrote:
Sorry about not responding sooner, net went down. Here is my past from two days ago that didn't make it.

ottomobiehl: Try Debian if you want a simple distro. What I mean by simple is it uses RPM, install package, to setup programs and services. Want something more custom and speedy try Gentoo. Great community and nice doc to help you. I tryed useing the newbie handbook to install my system, gave up, and used the advanced user quick install. Go figure, seemed easyer to be than 110 pages telling me the same thing.

Debian: http://www.debian.org/
Gentoo: http://www.gentoo.org/

Before you take the plung, look up what window manager you would like to use and try the 2.6 kernels.

Email me at jamie20ATgameboxDOTcom if you need help.

Um, I'm sure you could use RPM with Debian, but from what I know, you'd be clinically insane to make that your modus operandi...

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lame_duck wrote:
While I respect your option Macto, I have to say that FreeBSD is good, but limited. Game companies are starting to adopt linux which gives it a +5 usefulness in my book.  :-D

The 'Linuxulator' takes care of this pretty seamlessly, of course.  Had only one or two incompatibilities, one being with the PartyPack distribution of Elate, but that was patched way back in 4.x.

BTW, back in the day I used FreeBSD for a long time on my old 486. There was this "What OS is right for you?" thing on cnet.com and it sayed FreeBSD. So I got the boot floppy, took 2 days for download and install. Was great tho. How's things there latly?

Right now, things are 'good' but messy.  5.x is a long time coming, and a long time stabilizing... but I've been running 5.2(.1?) with a 64 day uptime, and few annoyances.  The only 'problem' is that 4.x was essentially on the road to perfection as far as user experience went, so now that 5 is the focus, there's still that little bit of regression and confusion.

DragonFly still looks like The One, but they're going to go ahead and declare a 1.0 without quite all the sugar that'd make it an obvious win for everyone.  (1.0 does seem to be about "we believe this is safe for people to try to run," but I'm not sure if anyone's daring to touch the packaging problem.  Kernel keeps getting More Magic(TM).)