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Ximian

Evolution Bug-Hunt! 229

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-cuz-ya-can't-code-doesn't-mean-ya-can't-help dept.
Matt Beale writes "Ximian is slated to release Evolution (a mail client for Gnome/Linux) by October 1st. In preperation, they are offering awards for finding bugs in Evolution! A important open project to participate in, AND i can win a palm VII, sweet!" My bug was that it kept crashing ;) October release is ambitious but very cool.
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Evolution Bug-Hunt! More

Evolution Bug-Hunt!

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  • I found a problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't find Microsoft Word.

  • release timeline (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Proud Geek ( 260376 )
    Ximian probably has to release quickly. I can't imagine they are in great shape financially. It could easily be that a quick launch is key to their survival, either by allowing them to show product and attract investors, or even by giving them some sort of revenue stream.
    • what exactly is their revenue model. I hope it's not just selling this [ximian.com] or this [ximian.com]...

      and I think they dropped the whole services idea.
    • I can't imagine they are in great shape financially.

      I think their Stuffed Monkey [ximian.com] sales will keep them afloat...
      • Rupert is not just a stuffed monkey. He is so much more, with thos cute button eyes you can see your boss behind you when your writing rtml.

      • Re:release timeline (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jbrw ( 520 )
        Except when I try to buy Rupert I get:

        [snip]
        Warning: PostgreSQL query failed: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "and" in /var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 11

        Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid PostgreSQL result resource in /var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 13

        Warning: PostgreSQL query failed: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "," in /var/www/html/xproddetail.php on line 18

        Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/xproddetail.php:11) in /var/www/include/shoplib.inc on line 50
        [snip]

        D'oh!

        ...j
    • This really seems to be similar to what people think is the MS business model. Buggy software to the masses, they will find the bugs, then sell them a little improved version, wait for more bugs, sell again,... And do a lot of cash in the mean time. And build a reputation of constantly improve your software.

      Gome is great!!

    • Re:release timeline (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:50PM (#2232595)
      I'm sorry, but why do so many people here care about the business aspects of Ximian? How is that that it's all about the benjamins? I thought it was all about the SOFTWARE!

      Certainly, Ximian has business realities that they need to attend to, but I'm at a loss for why those types of things are interesting to slashdotters. When was it exactly that the site turned from primarily people interested in cool technology to people who are interested in the latest business news? When was it that we gained so many people who act as if their entire self-worth is tied up in whether or not "open-source" proves itself to be a viable business model?

      Here's the reality of the situation - free software isn't going to die even if it CAN'T be made into a viable business model. If Ximian croaks tomorrow, that doesn't invalidate a single line of code that they put into Evolution. Sure, some businessman in a suit somewhere is going to be pissed off, but unless you are that guy, why do you care?

      Enjoy the software. Enjoy life. Life is good! Don't spend time wondering about Ximian's revenue models, their overhead, whether or not their VC capital is dwindling, or even whether or not ESR was right about all that non-software-related business stuff he spews about "open source". Do your part and be a GNU/Linux user, and let the suits take care of themselves.

      I don't necessarily think that suits and techies should be separated, but this vein of discussion is something that just isn't all that interesting.

      • Re:release timeline (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Khalid ( 31037 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @06:19PM (#2232742) Homepage
        I agree with the fact that Open Source won't go away, but if developers can't sustain themselves and can't work full time on projects, these projects will take forever to complete. Freasmeat and Sourceforge are full of projects which have been dragging their fleets for years and will never reach a useful state.

        Open Source software will catch up proprietary one only if companies who develop it can have enough money to fund development and R&D. Open Source can't relay forever on hobbyists programming in their spare time.
        • Sourceforge is, indeed, full of dead projects. But please note that many of those dead projects either contain no code at all, or code of the

          int
          rescue_the_world()
          {
          // TODO: figure out how to do this
          }

          variety. Code that does *nothing* at all.

          It is at the stage where code does at least one task well that the wheat is seperated from the chaff (except that one means wheat is another mans chaff). Before I pour considerable time into something, I test the waters: I do some small enhancement and report it to the authors. If they don't acknowledge that, I consider the thing to be unmaintained. Rejection of the code is not of a great concern, it's being ignored that hurts.

          I've had pretty good luck with a number of Open Source projects which involve no paid staff at all. Especially when compared with the support for some closed source offerings.

          The commercial open source thing is still very new. People jump up and down about Mozilla's failure, about OpenOffice's failure, etcetera. Let's face it, those are huge projects, and the success rate for their commercial counterparts is equally abysmal. The big hindrance for community contributions is the extremely steep learning curve for the infrastructure surrounding huge projects, and combined with rapid change that curve becomes in unsurmountable mountain. Once a more or less successful 1.0 is out, that ought to change.

          Unless I'm seriously mistaken, no huge commercial open source project has reached 1.0. Unless you count Linux, but that sort of underscores the point that contributions on any level have always been possible building on a stable base. You can rewrite, say, the IP stack or the VM system, but you can do that in relative isolation, despite the complexity of the task. API's are pretty well defined.

          Most of the grand commercial open source projects are just too big, with too many internal couplings. Writing a spreadsheet app is one thing (and plenty of those abound without commercial support). But keeping the thing alive when someone else is dicking with text editor code that your subproject needs is another. The horrible thing is, they need to be huge, because they need to appeal to the mass market.

          If I had my way, I'd had a simple mail client, a simple web browser, a simple spreadsheet, with the minimal glue between them to make it work for me, and allow me to replace a component I don't like with another.

          So, I guess you're right. Not because great things don't happen without people who are paid for writing free code, but because the marketplace demands solutions that are just too complex to deal with in part time.

      • but unless you are that guy, why do you care?

        Because we're the type of people who belive you can have your cake and eat it too. I agree that Open Source won't die if companies like Ximian do die, but I also hope that Companies like Ximian are able to make a couple of bucks, and will be able grow and prosper from Open Source projects, and that WE will be able to benfit from that prosperity.

        They fix bugs, add features, and make great, useful products.Ximian is a great asset to the Gnome community.

        Do your part and be a GNU/Linux user, and let the suits take care of themselves.

        Suits? Sure, I'm sure Ximian has it's 'suits', but it has regular people too. I've met several Ximian developers in person and online, and I consider them peers, not suits. I wish my peers Ximian good luck and good fortune... both the Tee-shirt wearing peers and the suit wearing almost-peers.

  • Bug.. already? (Score:4, Funny)

    by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid@NoSpAm.yahoo.com> on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @04:51PM (#2232297) Homepage Journal
    I found a bug -- it doesn't execute Outlook macro worms correctly!

    • Re:Bug.. already? (Score:2, Funny)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      main () { fork(); main(); }

      Not as efficient as it could be...

      Let's see, to avoid exess stack extension from infinite recursion of the exponentially growing process-count:

      main() { for(;;){ fork(); } }

      There we have a nice little system-killer. But, it's still not quite good enough becuase of that icky branch. If we fork n times, per loop, that's 2^n more processes before they all have to branch again....

      main() { for(;;){ fork(); fork(); fork(); } }

      Dancing in the dark... to the radio of love! ;-)

      • Re:Bug.. already? (Score:3, Informative)

        by ChadN ( 21033 )
        Any good forkbomb includes a payload...


        #include <stdlib.h>
        main() { char * foo; for(;;) {
        foo = malloc(1025);
        foo[0] = 'a';
        foo[1024] = 'b';
        fork(); fork(); fork();
        }
        }


        NOTE - I do NOT recommend running this on a machine without proper ulimits set...
      • fork(); fork(); fork();

        Am I the only one who thinks of the Swedish Chef when I see this?

  • Evolution 0.9 "shipping" now (Score:3, Informative)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @04:53PM (#2232312) Homepage
    Don't forget that Evolution 0.9 is shipping as part of the shrinkwrapped Ximian Desktop product. Though that part of the suite, at least, is labeled quite plainly as a "preview release," it's definitely integrated into their overall office productivity offering right now -- no longer a separate download. (This, as of the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco.)
  • This will make programmers WANT to put holes in software, then they will be a part of this and somehow "FIND" these holes at a later date.
    • A contest like this surely states in the rules that ximian employees and/or anyone who has anything whatsoever to do with the project is excluded from participating (or from receiving prizes - i guess they should still let ximian staff submit bugs ;-)
    • This will make programmers WANT to put holes in software, then they will be a part of this and somehow "FIND" these holes at a later date

      They pulled this stunt at NORTEL one time and IIRC it worked fairly well. We all laughed and said the same thing - designers will just toss in bugs to fix for moeny later - but they did have some smart rules and it seemed to work fairly well - the designers sure spent a LOT more time in teh lab tested the betas :)

  • if i had a nickel for every bug in windows 95...

  • here's a bug (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Greylin ( 72313 )
    it *bugs* me that you have to download all sorts of extra libraries just to get the fscking thing to work...why can't it just be one download and install with the favorite package mode of your choice -- ./config|make|make install, rpm, or dpkg?

    I think I'll stick with sylpheed...
    • apt-get install does it all in one download. Maybe more than one package but it is as close to possible of what you are asking.
    • That is why you should order a CD. If everything was simple on a download the only people who would buy the CD's would be those connected by modem.

    • Re:here's a bug (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PingXao ( 153057 )
      That's not a bug, it's a feature! Seriously, though, having to download all that extra stuff put me off as well. I just know that at least 3 of those things will require me to download and install something else besides. No thanks. I just don't have the time or inclination right now.

      As you said, if it was just one tarball to deal with then I'd have it running already!

    • Re:here's a bug (Score:2, Informative)

      by vukicevic ( 199951 )

      If you are compiling from source, you will indeed have to build a number of prerequisite libraries that track Evolution development, such as gal. This is no different than including all these libraries inside the evolution source tree -- except that these libraries are also used by other projects, and as such are independent modules. Now that bonobo, oaf, and others are stable, this isn't as big of a problem.



      If you just want to install Ximian Evolution, you can easily use Red Carpet to do it -- it will figure out exactly what packages you need and take care of the whole problem for you.

    • Re:here's a bug (Score:3, Informative)

      by Skeezix ( 14602 )
      This is the way software works. You build applications on platforms. In this case, Evolution is built on on the GNOME platform which is made up of libraries. It's no different in Windows or any other platform. One of the things that causes you to feel that perhaps it is different, is that free software moves so fast...so in order to get the latest you need more software than just what your distribution shipped with. That's precisely why, by the way, Ximian is selling shrinked-wrapped versions [ximian.com] of their software. You get it all on CD's with documentation and support. If you don't want to pay money for it, Red Carpet will happily resolve the dependancies for you. 99% of the problems people had with earlier version of Red Carpet have been resolved in recent builds. If Red Carpet is too slow for you, consider subscribing to Red Carpet Express [ximian.com] when it's available.

  • Important? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:02PM (#2232367)
    Someone explain to me why this is important, as asserted by this slashdot article. It's a mail user agent, no more, no less. It doesn't allow people to collaborate more efficiently. It isn't groupware. It's just an MUA with LDAP, an RSS viewer, and a calendar. Fun, but why important?

    • It's important if it allows you to replace Microsoft Outlook, which is one of the last reasons people are stuck with Windows desktops. Or at least it was supposed to replace Outlook; I don't know if it really does or not.

      • It's got a scheduling component, a to do list, an address book. There's already some stuff for calendar sharing. It's supposed to eventually synch with Palms but I don't think that's ready yet. It is already very nice though.
    • Because it is supposed to be what you have listed above and also slashdot community is interested in linux companies.
    • But it's groupware ambitions are clear. It's important not because of what it currently is (A pretty decent MUA AFAICT, vfolders are sweet), but for what it credibly promises to be in the future.

    • Re:Important? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:58PM (#2232636) Homepage
      Because Evolution is one of if not the premiere Workgroup and PIM free software solution. You can schedule appointments with other Evolution users or with any client supporting the iCalendar standard (Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes...). It offers the best integration I've seen amongst mail/PIM suites, and best of all it handles extremely large volumes of mail better than anything I've used. When you get 200+ emails a day, this is a lifesaver. Its Filter/vFolder capabilities are pretty powerful.
      • One word:

        mutt [mutt.org]

        Trust me, I've used them all. I even used to be a program manager at Microsoft (where we had rather integrated groupware, and a *lot* of mail), and nothing else has come close to handling the volume of personal email, work email, mailing lists, etc., that mutt does.

        If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. If you have given up on text based email readers because pine [washington.edu] doesn't cut it, or GUI clients because eudora [eudora.com] and outlook express [microsoft.com] don't do it for you, then you likely haven't taken the time to realize the potential of mutt.

        • I've used pine, mutt, and several others, yes. But mutt isn't a full workgroup/PIM suite. It's like comparing apples with oranges to compare mutt with Evolution.

  • Not too abitious (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:02PM (#2232368) Homepage
    October release is ambitious but very cool.

    I don't think it's that ambitious. I've been using Evolution as my primary mail client for almost a year. It's improved a lot in that time, and for the past several months it's been quite reliable and has all the features I need. I don't think that getting it up to release quality on that schedule is an unreasonable expectation.

  • Better Idea. (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:04PM (#2232376) Homepage Journal
    ..It'd be much cheaper if they just used the DMCA to arrest people that find bugs.. Hey, it works for Adobe.
  • Yay, so if you win, you receive a free copy of the buggy operating system? Who-hoo!
  • Why is it I cannot add a rss/xml feed to myevolution? Yes, I see the option to add news, but once I input the url, nothing changes. The news source is not added to the left or right window. I'm using debian with ximian btwian, and I do input a valid feed.
  • I want to be able to sync it to my desktop. Does evoloution or any other program with all the normal features work? I am looking for a calandar, contacts, perhaps even an emulator to run it. Any Ideas about this? I mean outlook can sync with my hand spring, can evoloution?
  • This is very cool. Insentive to help out. I'll try to take a look at some of ximians software starting next week, but I'm not at all optimistic. The last time I looked at ximian software they wanted me to download the gnome source from gnome.org and wouldn't support distributions like slackware. I'll see what I can do and try to include this in the distribution I'm currently working on, if all goes well maybe I'll even find a bug.
  • Oh where oh where has my little pine gone?

    I don't know about you guys, but I actually like a nice quick and easy telnet-into mail reader over and beyond outlook et al.. It's great being able to check my email from work/university/friend's house using what's normally pre-installed software (a telnet client) on every OS :)

    -Guy Incognito
    • Pine, it's not just a car freshener anymore!

      I do like pine myself, but telnet is way evil - cleartext passwords and login names :( Now pine and SSH is a good combination and a little more secure. My only remaining beef is that pine does not currently support the "Maildir" format made popular by qmail. <sigh/>

  • if it is opensource...i could configure it, write my own bugs, and then find them!!! Woohoo! I'm gonna write my self a couple of Palm VII's tonight.
    • if it is opensource...i could configure it, write my own bugs, and then find them!!!

      Uh, no. That's just stupid.

      Fnord? Hail Eris!
  • I found a bug! No slack pack availible, or even source gzip'd tarball for that matter.....

  • In all honesty, there are three things that Ximian needs to do quite quickly in order to get a wider distribution:

    1. Support more than Red Hat

    2. Support more then Red Hat

    3. Well, you get the idea

    I was hooked as a user of Ximian Gnome for some time, and even went through the effort of downloading and compiling Evolution. Then they stopped making builds that would work on Suse 7.x. After getting frustrated waiting ("any time now") I gave up and installed KDE to see how it had come along. Now Ximian is really going to have to do something special to get me to go back.

    Watching the Suse mailing lists, I'm not the only on in this situation. Outside of North America (and even inside if I'm any indication) Suse is quite heavily used -- it is definitely not a good idea to alienate a potentially large user base

    • Ximian just recently added support for Suse 7.x. I'm not sure what you mean about supporting more than Red Hat. Currently Ximian supports something like 18 different platforms. Mandrake 8 is also now supported. You can get it here [ximian.com].
    • What about Slackware 8©0, or any slackware for that matter© As a slackware user, I'm getting very tired of people hiding the source tarballs in some obscure ftp directory, and putting rpm's and deb packages right up front, or worse yet, net even making the source tarballs available© I know, I know, I could use CVS to get the source, but I like the idea of using some version that has been "blessed" by someone as stable, or semi-stable© Half the time the CVS sources don't even compile© I'm not asking for slackware ©tgz packages, just a little curtacy©

      as far as I'm concerned that is the biggest bug of them all©©©


    • I run Ximian Gnome on my Debian 2.2 system
      (it's potato + Ximian Gnome 1.4 + KDE 2.1.x).
      Works fine.

  • But will it work with an exchange server, or do I have to keep loading Outlook in wine?
    • From the Ximian Evolution FAQ [ximian.com]:

      Q: If we are a Windows based company with Unix users, can we use Ximian Evolution?

      A: If your server uses standard open protocols like LDAP, IMAP, POP, and SMTP, you can use Evolution with it. You can share addresses with vCards and calendar items with iCal appointments. We do not, however, support proprietary protocols at this time.
      ...

      This applies to Exchange. You can use it with exchange if you're using industry-standard open protocols.

  • Computers hate me. Software hates me. Gods of Information must be angry at me, for some unknown reason. This kind of challenges are just made for me.

    But really. I haven't seen a mail client better than Pine so far. Pine is small on the screen (80x25 or whatever you like). It reuses the entire view area in all different views. It's fast to use with keys, and keyboard control of most Linux/KDE/Gnome software is next to nothing. One of the best features of Pine is saving messages by the username of the sender (in incoming mail), and by the username of the receiver (in outgoing mail). 10x faster than moving messages to a long folder list with mouse. Yack, I hate (computer) mice (furry ones are ok though).

    • It's sad to see a text-based e-mail user caught in the Pine trap.

      Set aside a few hours and learn to use Mutt. It's open source (Pine isn't), and it does everything Pine can do (except for Pine's brain-dead menu system) plus a lot more. You'll thank yourself later.
  • I've been keeping up to date with the nightly snapshots (okay they are really semi-nightly). Very stable. Only had one go bad I think; it was a gtkhtml problem.

    Evolution actually rocks, mostly. I was very impressed that they simplified encrytion so it works just like Outlook. Press this button to sign then press this to encrypt. Very nice.

    Now, how about enabling the address book?

    • Whoops, as someone pointed out you have to create sub-folders, then add contacts. Strange. Ah well, rant revoked. Well done.

      • Re:Addressbook (Score:2, Informative)

        by Nodatadj ( 28279 )
        I think this is caused by the addressbook.db file in the root contacts folder being in the wrong format. runing killev and removing it, then restarting evolution should fix that, but you'll lose any contacts in that folder, so you might not want to do that :)
  • Wow, has any other company ever done this before? This is a great idea, and I use the software anyway. It's funny that a GNU based software developer would basically pay you to find bugs, but you have to pay M$ to get betas of their software...
  • Great! Who's getting the Head and Shoulders truck then?
  • Yeah, they submit the bugs and then get sued for violating the DMCA, they win a palm and a 10 year federal prison sentence, yeah!
  • This isn't a dig on Linux, but it would be nice if this worked in Win32 environments as well... as an organization gradually weaning ourselves off of Microsoft products, we could really use a cross-platform mail/calender client to replace Outlook on Windows. Ah well, maybe we'll be able to jump whole hog to Linux fairly soon anyway....

  • Notes from the bugmaster (Score:5, Informative)

    by luge ( 4808 ) <`gro.yugeit' `ta' `todhsals'> on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:40PM (#2232546) Homepage
    Hey! So... I guess I'm going to have a busy day tomorrow :) If you really want to get a good start and be helpful, I'd recommend that you read the Bug Day TODO list [ximian.com] before coming by the bug day. We need lots of help- but we also need people who are going to be willing to get their hands dirty in the bugzilla, not just sit in the channel and ask when their pet bug will be fixed.
    So... hope to see you all tomorrow, and hope that you'll be willing to help out in a constructive manner!
    Luis Villa
    Ximian Bugmaster
    P.S. I'll be reading responses, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks!
  • I've been testing Evo for a while (with an eye on getting that Palm VII), and I'm wondering where I am WRT to the other bug reporters. I've reported 20 unique bugs -- what have other people got?
    • A rudimentary contributor report. [ximian.com] This is not exactly the report that will be used for the prizes (this one doesn't adjust by date, dups, or a couple other factors) but it does give a ballpark idea of where people stand. Remember we'll also be giving out some stuff to people who find and mark dups, not just adding new bugs to the DB.

  • Very Cool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:42PM (#2232553)
    Not only do I *not* mind helping a company out when they are contributing free software back to the community, but when they actively solicit help like this and give people rewards, it's only going to help them out. Also, I think having your customers hunt for bugs reinforces the idea that you're not claiming you're perfect (and thus not trying to pull the wool over their eyes about defects in the software) and also as part of the free software community it makes people feel like they have a stake in the software. Which would you rather use - a package where you felt you had some sort of stake, or MegaCorp's package where feature requests are forwarded to /dev/null and the support team consists of an auto-reply email system?

    As a side effect, it's probably a smart marketing move since as I'd imagine, the Ximian FTP sites are hopping right now with slashdotters trying to download a copy of Evolution to win something.

    So let's review:
    - Free (as in beer) stuff (always cool)
    - Free (as in speech) software (even cooler)

    What a deal!
  • I realize ximian "doesn't really have time" to guarantee compatability with Debian-unstable, but I know a lot of people who use unstable. If you use unstable, in general you're the kind of person who would report a bug when a program crashes.

    For MONTHS there has been a dumb bug with libgnomeprint11 (their version) that makes it never install on any of my machines. Thanks guys, I hope you get those bugs checked soon, but not by me, even though I was willing.

    That and they're trying to force everyone to use redcarpet when I really perfer apt, especially since redcarpet is buggy.

    This isn't a flame, it's more like me crying because nothing ever makes any sense. I think Miguel & co are great folks, and I hope they do well.
  • Stallman alert!
    woop! woop!

  • Why must it look so MS? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kabir ( 35200 ) on Wednesday August 29, 2001 @05:55PM (#2232618)
    I have no idea of the actual functional quality of Evolution, or any other Ximian product, but that doesn't matter because I'm annoyed about something else... Why is it that they feel the need to make it look just like Microsoft software? Personally, I _hate_ the way Outlook looks, it's blocky, inelegant, and screams Microsoft. So why does Ximian adopt it? Trying to convert all the Outlook users? I suppose that might work, but it has the annoying side effect of a) still being ugly as sin, and b) reinforcing the (broken) idea that Microsoft has the right idea. I'm all for new MUAs, etc. but it would be nice if their look was at least a little bit more inventive (and elegant!).

    That said, I'm still happy with mutt. It does exactly what I need it to, including allowing image and html viewing, and I can read my mail over an ssh connection from anywhere. Until someone can give me that functionality (even with a lightweight interface for sshing and a heavier one for when I'm in my chair) I doubt I'll be terribly interested in stuff like evolution. Especially since it's so bloody ugly...
    • Damnit, figure it out you dope:

      That's a *lot* of users, and a *lot* of money, even if they only get a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the corporate user marketshare.

      If they, for example, get a name for themselves that prompts *small businesses* to try them out, that's good.

      Small businesses hire cheap people (the good ones do) and the cheapest types usually, at the very least, know MS Outlook ...

      So: imitating an existing interface that people may know how to use, and *doing it far cheaper* than can be done by buying properly licensed copies of the similarly featured Microsoft apps.

      Seems sound to me. I hope Ximian have a really strong, confident marketing team...
  • I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but anyway, I have been trying to get gnome working on my Linux box for weeks. After compiling package after package, I am now stuck. I need to compile libOrbit, but whenever I try I get:


    gcc -g -O2 -o .libs/name-client name-client.o ../../../src/orb/.libs/libORBit.so -L/usr/lib -lglib -lm ../../../src/IIOP/.libs/libIIOP.so ../../../src/ORBitutil/.libs/libORBitutil.so .libs/libORBitCosNaming.so -L/usr/lib -lglib -lm -Wl,--rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib
    ../../../src/IIOP/.libs/libIIOP.so: undefined reference to `res_init'
    collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
    make[4]: *** [name-client] Error 1



    I've logged the problem with the gnome team, but have got no reply. Well great. I can't use gnome on my system.

  • New Economy (Score:2, Funny)

    by lavaforge ( 245529 )
    What are the odd's that one of the Ximian programmers will get bribed into working out some sort of black market in bugs? I can just see the details now:

    "Alright, buffer overflow? That's 5 percent. Poor optimization? That's ten percent. Logic errors? That'll cost ya'."

  • I think they should add one more prize, which everyone would have a chance to win based on the number of bugs they report. I know I won't be in the top 10 reporters, and I doubt I will find the hairiest or most bizarre bug, but might spend a little more time testing it if I still had a chance to win something

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