Hi folks Firstly I'd like to thank everyone who replied to my email. I've decided to document my experience with trinity in case developers are saying to themselves - we've created the best DE ever and few are useing it - don't they know how good it is? Hopefully this reply will help improve the interaction between the developers and the end users because without some improvement this fork will go the same way as most of the others - into a back water. Just to explain where I am coming from, I am no expert, the first interaction with computers was in the mid 80s when I was writing machine code, by hand - literally, on a home computer - requiring the tv as vdu. Unfortunately I didn't continue down that road, so I'm no geek. Discovered linux 2008 and was immediately hooked. Discovered kde3.5 and found my nirvana. Have used kubuntu 8.04 since. LOVE the console and always look forward to writing scripts when necessary, sometimes even when not! (you know what I mean). But I have never compiled or applied a patch - in my defence I am tired, old and have other more pressing matters to attend to. If you want to see how I use my computer have a look here: http://www.lougogan.com/computer/linux/screen-01.php (this was when I was changing my web site from html to php - it wasn't contrived) So, in short I am not a newbie and not a geek - just somehwere in-between. Is that the description of a no-hoper? ;-) I DO understand that the work done by the developers is volunatary work etc.so please take this as CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. I, for one, want to see trinity work and be successful for the LONGTERM - for purely selfish reasons! ;-) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Julius The mention of the live CD got my attention immediately. Initially I had downloaded ubuntu 10.10 solely to have an up-to-date buntu version before downloading trinity - what a waste of a cd, what can I say about Unity - ugly CHOAS! I went back and checked out the official installation page and saw the link to the live CDs. I had seen the link before but the way it was worded it looked as if it was a link to buy a CD with trinity installed. I have downloaded it and plan to check it out within the hour! That download page has some strange coding. My downloaded file was named: redirect.php\?file\=cdimages%2Fkubuntu%2Fmaverick%2Fkubuntu-10.10-trinity-desktop-i386.iso (work needs to be done on the official pages - I think) Thanks Julius (results further down the page) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Glen Cunningham A g'day back to you! Thanks for your help, will try out the live CD first. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Calvin Thanks (see reference to Slavek below) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Timothy Pearson wrote: This isn't about development but rather keeping things already released tidy before going forward ie not having a link to a version which doesn't work - that kind of thing! 8^) Thanks (see reference to Slavek below) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ref Slavek for someone to mention "Slavek's 3.5.13.1 packages" is equivalent - AND AS HELPFUL - to me as saying There is a man in China who has the answer. He lives on a road with a tree on the corner and his house has a green door. NOT very helpful - IMHO. That answer may as well have been written in Serbo-Croatian-Outer-Mongolian-Yak-Script (I hope that is a part of the language package in trinity !!) AND I think this is the core of the problem. I think a wiki is required because developers will always have a non-'thick-user' frame of mind, which is very natural, and this nearly always creates a situation where the terse explanation "Slavek's 3.5.13.1 packages" seems so obvious to the developer while remaining totally baffling to the user. Who is Slavek? How do I get in touch with him/her/it? Where does "Slavek's 3.5.13.1 packages" live? Does this mean compiling? Patching? The problem is that you KNOW these answers and don't realise that WE - these demanding annoying users - are not in that same developer bubble as you. Instructions for the users should be written by the users - NOT by the developers. The phrase "Slavek's 3.5.13.1 packages" means absoutely NOTHING to ME. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Dan Youngquist We think as one. Are we twins? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @LeeE You'll go far! Another twin? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @ Lisi The reason why I used the term 'the WOW factor' was to draw attention to this totally destructive attitude of - this one doesn't work right, but wait till you see the next one - it'll be great!!!! Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but I think an official page linking to an official release which doesn't work somehow doesn't make much sense, but then again - I am not an expert! :=} I wasn't talking about bits I didn't like, but merely the fact it didn't work at all. IF the page had said - "this does not work - go write your own!", then I would have nothing to complain about. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ @Tim From what I've seen and read, this 'rush' for the next release is detrimental to the steady and longterm success of any DE 'version'. Too much 'pressure' can lead to developers dropping out because instead of being a pleasure and an interest it just turns into a grinding chore. Developers should develop, with some feedback from users, and users should have a group to organise instructions for new users - those who know about the using the DE to help those who don't. I would dearly love trinity to not only work but to gain a firm foothold in the DE landscape. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ RESULTS OF DOWNLOADING THE LIVE CD (for those of a nervous disposition, please turn away now!) As Julius mentioned the live CD I downloaded it and tried it out. I ended up with a cli screen ubuntu@ubuntu: I thought that it might be my computer causing problems (my hard drive is beginning to whine as if about to kick the bucket!). Luckily I have a second computer so I tried the live CD on that and ended up with the same cli. Even though I've never used it in the past I decided to try the command startx just to see if that would work...and it did. (NOTE: a total newbie would not know that command). I then tried it again on my work-horse computer and it happened to automatically start the gui mode after a few seconds delay in the cli mode, so I installed it on a spare partition. Naturally enough I immediately decided to customise some of the design ie panel, clock, menu etc. to see how it 'worked' but half way through the clock customising, the colour chooser crashed, but I was able to continue and closed the clock dialogue box. Then I noticed that there was still a button of the clock dialogue box in the taskbar and I wasn't able to switch desktops. I decided to open a konsole and see if I could kill the clock dialogue box. The konsole opened but without a titlebar and it didn't accept any input. The system hadn't totally crashed - the menu worked but at that stage I decided to end that session and presume that this version wasn't going to be right no matter what. So, this long saga brings my experience with trinity up to date. I still want to have a kde3.5.xx/trinity type desktop and I wouldn't mind testing out the R14 when it comes out but for me I need a DE that helps me to get real work done - not a DE that I have to work on just trying to get it to work (if you get what I mean!). Someone mentioned Debian so I might check that out (I have only ever used kubuntu) but I don't want to spend hours and hours just trying to see if trinity works. AND the point is that even if I download and install Debian wheeze, sqeeze, breeze or sneeze than I still have the dilemma of should I download 3.5.13 or "Slavek's 3.5.13.1 packages" wherever that is? Will I have to compile it? Patch it? From my point of view, the whole thing is just a crazy unmitaged disaster zone. As far as I can see, in a way it's a case of the developers deciding: Is trinity to be a DE only for geeks or is it to be organised and 'packaged' for 'normal' linux users. PS From what I've read on this list it seems as if trinity does NOT work with any ubuntu releases. May I make a suggestion - PLEASE TAKE ALL REFERENCE TO UBUNTU OFF THE INSTALLATION PAGE. PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. Just doing that would be such a positive move forward for trinity AND it would not waste the time of, and create the frustration and annoyance for, stupid innocent users like me!! Nevertheless - I will continue to live in hope that someday I will be installing a working trinity DE! (I'll have to read up about Debian) 8=) Sorry for the long email. I have to go to bed now to rest my weary head! ;@) Cheers to all. Lou Gogan Saula, Achill, Co Mayo, Ireland ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Where the sun shines from morning till night.......above the rain clouds. www.lougogan.com www.irishcitizen.ie

<snip> Thank you for your detailed input! I apologise for not pointing directly to Slavek's packages ( https://quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/~slavek-banko/+archive/axis for the record ); it was late at night and I didn't have the link handy at the time. As you probably found out, the last LiveCD was released a while ago on a somewhat unstable Ubuntu version (non-LTS). This is being worked on; in fact I am only waiting on LibreOffice 3.6 to be released before I should be able to generate a new (less buggy) LiveCD with TDE installed. The information on kgtk is helpful. This package will likely be removed from the installation metapackages in the future ( http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=1078 ). One of the most frustrating things about our current 3.5.13 release is the persistent sudo problem. This has been fixed for R14.0, but the fix relies on new technology in Ubuntu that is not present in the oldest supported Ubuntu releases for TDE 3.5.13. There are other problems with 3.5.13 that cannot really be fixed with an SRU, which is the primary reason I (and many other developers here) have been concentrating on R14 and getting it out the door as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality. Tim

On Saturday 30 June 2012 00:35:28 Timothy Pearson wrote: Hi Tim The one thing I realise is that to progress I really do need to bypass ubuntu and consider installing Debian directly and things should be more stable thereafter - after the learning curve. Though, I'll also watch out for the next live CD. I'll also try some of the other suggestions. I look forward to using Trinity soon....ish !! Thanks Thanks to everyone else who gave advice. Lou

On 06/28/2012 06:08 PM, Calvin Morrison wrote: Part of his point was that the installation instructions on the website do not result in a working system. This is something we talked about here several months ago, and nothing has been done about it. Repeating what I said then, how many people do you think have found the website, tried to install Trinity according to the instructions there, ended up with a hopelessly buggy system and a lot of time wasted, and will never try Trinity again? Lou is one of a tiny minority who have come to the mailing list looking for help -- many, many more simply go away quietly. How hard would it really be to fix the website? What would it take -- 20 minutes? And how many are there here who are perfectly capable of doing it if given access? It would move the project from a few developers and die-hard dedicated groupies, to an actual viable DE that anyone can install and use. I would've thought that would be a pretty high priority, but what do I know? -- PGP key: http://homestead-products.com/pubkey.htm

<snip> I was not actually aware of the magnitude of the problem until just now, as I tend to use the nightly builds on new installs. Do we actually have a procedure written anywhere that results in successful installation on Ubuntu? People have access to the Wiki and I would be more than willing to redirect the Ubuntu/Debian install instructions to a Wiki page until R14 is released; would someone who has managed to install TDE successfully be willing to write a brief set of instructions for the Wiki? I did not originally intend R14 to take so long to make it to release. In fact I was not even planning for a 3.5.13 SRU, but enough bugs were discovered over time (some original KDE bugs as well) to significantly delay the next release. This is obviously suboptimal and it looks like some things will need to be partially fixed in the interim. Tim

Timothy Pearson wrote: I think the instructions that are there now only lack the hint to set up a root password temporarily to aid the sudo replacement. I've seen some websites with guides to address this. Julius

Hello, It's great to follow this thread and see that so much effort is made to improve Trinity. As it seems to be in a state of flux, I've held off on reinstalling but now want to go ahead. Glen Cunningham's suggestion of http://exe-linux.fastfishwebsolutions.com/trinity/wheezy/ interests me, partly to avoid apparent problems with *buntus. I wonder if anyone would recommend a more recent iso, such as exelinux_squeeze_trinity_3.2.iso, or one of the previews? Or something different? With the aim of having a good working Trinity system that will be upgradable to R14 and beyond. Robert

On Friday 29 June 2012, Uwe Brauer wrote: To give my 2 cent to the problems that might occur and a simple workaround I simply copy an old mail from this list (sorry for redundant information but it should not get forgotten) ------------------------- snip ------------------------------------------ On Wednesday 02 May 2012, Slávek Banko wrote: This is a great piece of information. For month I was not able to use  * lazarus-ide  * dropbox  * calibre as a normal user. The only work-arround was using 'sudo NAMEOFAPPLICATION'. You saved my live! I've googled a lot to know what could be the culprit without success. Uninstalling kgtk-qt3-trinity brought all back to normal. What a big step forward! kgtk-qt3-trinity should not be installed by default. Or there should be a big warning on the www.trinitydesktop.org page! ------------------------- snip ------------------------------------------ Gerhard

On Friday 29 June 2012 11:13:37 Slávek Banko wrote: I have been ill since the problems arose last week, and had a lot on my plate. (A bad combination!) but will attempt to report them later today. Sorry, Slávek. I know that you can't put something right if you don't know about it. Repentantly :-( Lisi

Hi, Slávek! Please scrap the email I inadvertently sent to you off-list last night. On Friday 29 June 2012 11:13:37 Slávek Banko wrote: I now cannot see why I couldn't resolve the error that I have an error message for; it looks simple to resolve. And where I have no error messages, there is no-where to start. So I clearly need to get access to the computer and start again. Which is sadly unlikely to be before the release. It is, as I have said, 10 miles away, and I am temporarily housebound. Lisi

On Tuesday 03 July 2012 17:43:29 David Hare wrote: This is where ignorance is most definitely _not_ bliss. (Is it ever?) I lag a long way behind you in knowledge of the nitty gritty. So, there is my solution! Get my head down and become more competent! I'm all for avoiding buggy unwanted packages - but have no idea how to exclude them. Other than by installing things one by one, of course, but it doesn't seem to be feasible for the base system. Lisi

I'd really appreciate that thing. BTW, how stable/well tested is exegnulinux_3.3_preview4.iso ? I'm going to have a class on debian software development in a fortnight and do definitly not want to throw KDE4 on my victims. Nik

Dne út 3. července 2012 Lisi napsal(a): Hi Lisi With Kaffeine maybe it was the problem with unnecessary dependence on kpackage and kdesudo. For normal use are not needed and install-codecs are not part of the package. I think that these dependencies could be removed. Any objections? With flash plugin I have two problems: 1) I hate it (but probably do not need to repair it ;) ) 2) version 11.x on my machine crashes at every opportunity - in fact, does nothing else (in Iceweasel and Chromium, in Konqueror I have flash disabled). While version 10.x works without problems. Does anyone have such problems with the version 11.x? Or does it to me because I hate him? ;) Problems with digikam database upgrade would need to be verified. However, I have included digikam to 3.5.13.1 only a few days ago (2012-06-08). Slavek --

Re flash: I get better results using flash-plugin-nonfree (11.2 r202) and iceweasel (12.0) from Debian Backports. Flash was always a problem for Linux users, thanks proprietary software vendors. A lot depends on hardware, graphics and cpu. Better on a core2 than single. Re exegnulinux_3.3_preview4.iso: No it's not very well tested but at least nobody found anything wrong yet! It is probably already better than 3.2. It works in live mode and installs fine. Re tde-lite-meta: I made one (first scrappy attempt) http://exe-linux.fastfishwebsolutions.com/apt/pool/main/t/tde-lite-dzz/tde-… but maybe not much use except as an example, you probably don't want an extra repo enabled; obviously if not and you do dpkg -i the deps (core tde packages) can't be handled by apt. Maybe till an "official" deb meta is made a simple bash script is better, e.g. #!/bin/bash apt-get update for i in $(cat packagelist); do apt-get -y --force-yes install $i; done I will revisit that later and post back. If anyone wants to unpack my deb and see the dep list, or rearrange it, or got a better idea, good. Good to see kdesudo and kpackage out of kaffeine recommends. Other bloat issues are timidity, freepats (recommends of soundkonverter?) but not looked in-depth at that yet. Re: the original thread posting "is there a version of trinity that actually works"? Yes. TDE 3.5.13+axis updates on Debian Squeeze, installed out of X from a selected package list. My current "lite" package list (gives a very function system, it's what I use in exegnu): kdebase-trinity amarok-trinity ark-trinity gwenview-trinity gtk-qt-engine-trinity k3b-trinity k3b-data-trinity kaddressbook-trinity kaffeine-trinity kcalc-trinity karm-trinity kate-plugins-trinity kcoloredit-trinity kcron-trinity kde-core-trinity kde-i18n-engb-trinity kde-i18n-es-trinity kde-style-qtcurve-trinity kdeaddons-kfile-plugins-trinity kdeartwork-trinity kdeartwork-emoticons-trinity kdeartwork-misc-trinity kdeartwork-style-trinity kdeartwork-theme-icon-trinity kdeartwork-theme-window-trinity kdebase-kio-plugins-trinity kdeeject-trinity kdegraphics-kfile-plugins-trinity kdelibs-trinity kdelibs-data-trinity kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins-trinity kdf-trinity kdiff3-trinity kdirstat-trinity kdm-trinity libkcddb1-trinity libtqt3-integration-trinity kregexpeditor-trinity kget-trinity kghostview-trinity kicker-applets-trinity kio-locate-trinity kipi-plugins-trinity kmix-trinity knemo-trinity knotes-trinity konq-plugins-trinity konqueror-trinity konversation-trinity kpdf-trinity kpowersave-trinity kscreensaver-trinity kscreensaver-xsavers-trinity ksensors-trinity ksnapshot-trinity ksplash-engine-moodin-trinity ksvg-trinity ktorrent-trinity kuser-trinity kwin-style-crystal-trinity soundkonverter-trinity

On Friday 29 June 2012 10:55:06 Lisi wrote: Sorry, Tim. That doesn't read back well, and is more open to misinterpretation even than the generality of emails. I was, at the time that I knew about that decision, still feeling slightly prickly about the Ubuntu release-on-schedule-whatever-the-cost mentality. I apologise for my choice of words. I immensely admire, and am profoundly grateful for, all the hard work and dedication that you and the other developers put in. Moreover, your explanation makes sense, so I was even wrong. :-( "prepared to offer" is also an ungracious way of saying it. I was just trying to express what is more usually and colloquially phrased as "put up, or shut up". If I am unwilling or unable to do things for myself, I must just be grateful for what other people are being generous enough to offer me. So again, many thanks to you and all the others who work so hard to give us Trinity. Lisi