GNOME's newbiew woes and rantings

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 12:57 +0100, Steiner, Bernard wrote:
> Dear GNOME,
> I would like to tell you a story about what happens when a seasoned non-combatant BSD veteran tries and installs GNOME:
> 
> In the beginning, I got 386bsd release 0.0 which was a pain to install on an ESDI drive because it only supported one floppy drive and one hard disk and refused to boot off the ESDI drive.
> This eventually got patched and 0.1 would let me boot off my beloved ESDI drive.
> There were no further patches to 0.1, so eventually I installed FreeBSD (though I admit that memory fails me
> as to whether that was 1.X or 2.X). Ever since then have I managed to upgrade my system from source,
> so currently it runs 6.3-PRERELEASE (I track -STABLE).
> 
> The system is now an AMD64 and indeed it runs X11.
> Sound runs wonderfully, DVD playback works, etc.
> 
> So I decided now was the time to take a step forward and grabbed GNOME from ports.
> This seems to have been a big mistake:
> There appear to be not many manual pages worth mentioning.
> Some processes (of which I am not sure what they are supposed to be doing) seem to grab a CPU
> and just increase its core temperature as a CPUhog.
> Some processes SEGV on me straight away (abiword, some screen savers, and others which I haven't the foggiest idea what they are supposed to do). The number of *.core files I got since I started on GNOME simply amazes me.
> Sometimes the system just freezes. And, yes, it is not just the screen but also network IO is no longer possible
> which really bothers me because then my nice gmirror disks are un-synced and also need an fsck so the next time the system boots it takes about an hour to get past fsck and gmirror re-sync.
> 
> I am very unhappy with this.
> 
> Methinks I am missing something very basic and fundamental here. I just cannot begin to assume that anybody would even consider using GNOME if it really were as buggy as that.
> 
> So I went to have a look at the FreeBSD´s GNOME how-to, and I must admit there's not an awful lot there that might help me get this mess sorted out. Nor is the GNOME site helpful in any way.
> 
> Should I re-compile the whole lot with -g -bstatic and start a serious gdb session ?
> 
> Where should I start looking ?

The instructions at http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/bugging.html gives
you all the information you will need to report a problem with GNOME on
FreeBSD.  If you are seeing crashes, then you will need to rebuild some
ports with debugging symbols to get useful backtraces.  But it also
sounds like you're seeing kernel panics which means you will need to
rebuild the kernel with debugging support, and report those problems to
the stable@ list.

That said, I run GNOME on amd64 (as do a few other users), and I don't
have the problems you're describing.  There was a recent bug in AbiWord
on amd64 that I fixed which caused it to crash at startup.  As far as I
know AbiWord has since been working for people on amd64.

Joe

-- 
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