[svlug] Understanding the problem (was networking & wifi disabled)

[Akkana Peck]

Peter van der Linden writes:
> >> Not to criticize Joel, and sometimes expediency calls for
> >> drastic measures, but if the answer is reinstall, you might as
> >> well downgrade to Windows.
, ... ]
> I'm advocating that we should understand a problem, and *then*
> choose a remedy to match.

I'm a big fan of understanding the roots of a problem and solving it
on that basis. Because I am, I waste many days chasing down problems
that ought to "just work", and probably would "just work" if I
gave in and installed a bone stock Ubuntu Gnome desktop with no
customizations.  Modern Linux distros (except maybe Gentoo) are
written with the assumption that you aren't going to change anything
-- so reverting to the original (reinstalling) will often fix a problem.

Understanding this stuff *shouldn't* take days of wasted time -- but
it does, because none of this crap has decent documentation.  With a
lot of the underlying processes in Linux -- networking, fonts, sound,
external storage -- there are plenty of "Click on the System Settings
menu, then click on ...  here's a screenshot" howtos, but not much
"Then the foo daemon runs the /etc/acpi/bar.sh script, which calls
ifconfig with these arguments". Mostly you have to reverse-engineer
it by running experiments, or read the source code.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It may be sort of obsessive-compulsive
disorder, but I guess it's better than washing my hands 'til they bleed,
or hoarding 100 cats. At least I end up with a nice customized system
and more knowledge about how Linux works. And no cat food expenses.

But don't get on someone's case because he doesn't have days to
waste chasing down deep understanding of a system problem.  If
you're going to get on someone's case, go after the people who
write these systems and then don't document how they actually work,
so people could debug them.

	...Akkana, currently stymied figuring out why SD cards no
	longer mount in Lucid without hal -- neither udev rules
	nor udisks aka devicekit seem able to create /dev/sdb1