Re: Is FreeBSD ready for desktop (Mozilla Flash)

From: Conrad (nospam_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 09/08/05 

Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:57:34 GMT

On Thu, 08 Sep 2005 13:36:09 +0000, Philip Paeps wrote:

> Conrad <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> # note: all dates are in American format mm/dd/yy
>
> A bad habit like that can't be too hard to kick, can it? Same goes for
> sarcasm. It's the lowest form of wit. Really.
>

I'm totally in favor of kicking yymmdd - it is sequentialy stupid.
Of course I'm also in favor of such weird things as meters and
kilograms, 24-hour time, Dvorak keyboards, and, believe it or not,
FreeBSD. As to the lowest form of wit, you are in total agreement
with my ex-wives.

>> # 09/05/05 Installed new FreeBSD - 5.4
>>
>> This is the allegedly "stable" version - right?
>
> Not 'allegedly' or 'the', but it is a stable release, yes. Well-spotted.
>

No sarcasm? ;-)

>> The install totally fails to figure out the onboard video, and settles on
>> selecting the VESA driver as the best possible driver. (hint: some sort of
>> attempt at the unichrome driver would have been nice)
>
> Patches are welcome, of course. Or technical information which would allow
> competent hackers to do the patching for you. A number of hardware vendors
> like to keep their specifications secret for some reason, which makes it
> difficult for people to write drivers to support them.
>

I wish like hell I could submit patches. Many years ago, I was privileged
to do O/S level work on a couple of platforms (Commodore VIC, anyone?)
I haven't had that much fun since - or the time for it. Probably accounts
for my sarcasm. The events of my life have overtaken my life. Which is
not a particularly unusual circumstance, which is why things that
should work, but don't are significantly frustrating.

>> Of course, in spite of the fact that I also have a very generic monitor, (an
>> AOC model 7F), somehow the install fails to detect such bizarre and weird
>> parameters as the horizontal synch and vertical refresh - which I must
>> configure manually, in order to even get an X desktop. (hint: basic
>> identification of generic hardware would also be nice)
>
> If the monitor doesn't support probing for this, or if the probing mechanism
> is kept secret by the vendor, naturally, X11 won't be able to offer you that
> feature. You've clearly been buying hardware from vendors who don't want you
> to use their hardware.
>

Ahh, but the crux of the issue is this - it can't be that bloody secret,
because at least in this case, the O/S whose mascot is the tubby waddling
waterfowl has no problems picking up all the arcane details of my monitor.

Yes, hardware needs to be screened, and all hardware that depends on
WinDrivers to act like real hardware is evil and should be inserted
in the designers ventral orifice. Forcibly. But on a weekend, after
a disastrous lightning strike which pretty much eliminated my ability
to go online and research, I went conservative and fairly mainstream for
replacement hardware - which really isn't that outrageous a route to take.

>> Next, having finally gotten an X desktop, I fire up Mozilla. More bad news.
>> The first site I hit tells me I have no Flash support. OK, OK, in spite of
>> the fact that when I installed BSD I asked for a fairly complete X desktop,
>> Flash is just too new, too wild, too far out there to consider for
>> inclusion.
>
> Flash is a worthless proprietary technology designed to cause discrimination
> on the www. It allows fools to hide information in bloaty animated formats
> which are impossible to understand by the visually impaired, even if they
> happen to be using a hardware/software combination blessed by Macromedia.
>

For the record, I have exactly one animation on the website that _was_
hosted on my lightning-toasted server box. It is a dancing monkey that
is there precisely to illustrate how that silly s#|t can serve to
distract from real content.

On the flip side, my budget is modest, and I must share my equipment
with other household members, who have the not too unreasonable
expectation that the resident geek can give them a reasonable
facsimile of their experience on Windows without too much compromise.
I, on the other hand, would prefer to meet that expectation without
having to contaminate my hardware with Windows. So I have them
using OpenOffice, and xmms and mplayer, etc. But, like it or not,
Flash is part of the web experience for some folks.

> I like to use a null-plugin which replaces flash animations (and other silly
> proprietary plugins which add zero value to the browsing experience) by white
> space.
>
>> What does ***THE HANDBOOK*** say? I quote, chapter and verse:
>> "Macromedia Flash plugin is not available for FreeBSD. However, a software
>> layer (wrapper) for running the Linux version of the plugin exists. This
>> wrapper also supports Adobe® Acrobat® plugin, RealPlayer plugin and more."
>
> ...provided you are running on i386, Macromedia and Adobe don't provide any
> binaries for alpha, sparc64, ppc, or ia64. Adobe, at least, publishes its
> specifications so that others can write (and have written!) implementations
> for them. Macromedia doesn't do that.
>

Yep, all i386 - although I have a couple of old Sun boxes that I want to
play with some day - if I ever have the time. But I won't hope that
everything will "just work" on the Sun boxes. On the other hand, I kind
of do have that expectation on i386. I'm pretty sure that there are more
copies of FreeBSD running on i386 than on any of the other hardware
platforms.

>> Cool. I mean, the Linux emulation on FreeBSD is highly praised, right? The
>> BSD developers have pulled a miracle out of their respective butts, and
>> against incredible odds have managed to support one completely open-source
>> *nix on another completely open-source *nix. Nothing so trivial as
>> supporting, say, a completely obscure, closed source O/S.
>
> There is also binary compatibility for OSF1 on FreeBSD/Alpha, and I seem to
> recall support for other obscure operating systems also existed at some point,
> but died because no one was interested in maintaining it.
>

Linux, believe it or not, is not an obscure operating system, unless
you're one of the vast unwashed and uninformed who don't realize
that Bill Gates actually IS the antichrist. And, in fact, Linux binary
compatibility, far from dying due to lack of interest, is a much touted
feature of FreeBSD. Such venerable sources as OnLamp even claim that some
Linux programs run better under FreeBSD than they do under Linux. Again,
I'm not asking for anything that arcane. It's there, allegedly actively
supported, and claims are made that at least in some cases, "we do Linux
better than Linux".

>> I mean any code weenie could whip up something that would let users say, run
>> MS Word on their Linux desktop in a weekend. But supporting one *nix on
>> another *nix? That's bloody astounding.
>
> Yes. Why would anyone want to run Microsoft software? That's about as
> ridiculous as wanting to run Macromedia Flash, for instance, or using Adobe
> Acrobat instead of any of a number of Free implementations which work just as
> well but don't require you to enter into contracts requiring you to sacrifice
> your firstborn baby.
>

I don't want to run Microsoft software. And that's exactly my point.
Whether or not you approve, there is supposed to be a way to implement
this functionality, without having to run Microsoft - or it's applications.

>> OK, I need to install the linuxpluginwrapper port. I will ignore for the
>> moment the fact that documenting full pathnames might be nice, i.e.
>> /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper, which is where I go to do a make install.
>
> Not everyone has their ports tree installed under /usr.
>

No, that's true - but since that's the default install, and by far the
majority case, why not document it that way? Documentation that attempts
to be generic to handle the fringe cases seems to be documentation that
compromises the majority. If you have a genuine need to move your ports
tree to an NFS share, perhaps you're bright enough to find out how to do
it. In the meantime, why not document as clearly as possible for the
majority?

>> Which fails. Why does it fail? Because of a dependency on a very weird and
>> obscure piece of software that almost nobody has ever heard of - Acrobat
>> Reader.
>
> *yawn*
>
> If you'd read the Makefile, you would have known that you could easily build
> the pluginwrapper without plugins, after which you could install the plugins
> one by one. The ones you need, not the ones you don't.
>

If the port maintainers had read the makefile, perhaps it wouldn't refer
to files that do not exist. Now there's a thought. That, in a nutshell
is it. The pervasive attitude that it's perfectly fine to release a BSD
can be released that that makes it incumbent on the users to do what the
maintainers either couldn't do, or couldn't be bothered to do. Does that
make sense to anyone?

>> But that's OK - because I don't have a /etc/libmap.conf anyway. so even if
>> the port had built, I probably wouldn't have been able to "Follow the
>> instructions displayed by the port"
>
> cat pkg-message?
>

Which is less than illuminating - at least in this case.

>> A modest suggestion, folks. Drop the desktop support. Just get rid of it.
>> It's clearly beyond your scope, which is apparently devoted to niche server
>> markets.
>
> I've been running FreeBSD on my desktop machines (and indeed my laptop) for
> many years without any trouble. But then, I don't devote my life to watching
> bloaty Macromedia Flash animations on websites designed by fools to keep the
> information as inaccessible as possible.
>

I can't claim many years, but I can claim about five - as you'll note
below, I do prefer it, but...as evil as Macromedia may be, it is
undeniably ubiquitous - and allegedly works on Linux, and by extension,
and admission (it IS in the ports tree) works on FreeBSD. It is the
"allegedly" portion of that statement that irks me.

>> When the most popular browser on the planet (barring M$ Internet Exploiter)
>> can't be made to "just work"
>
> Mozilla Firefox works just fine here. As does Lynx.
>

With, by your own admission, a null plugin. As far as Lynx, I just
checked, and, sure enough, ed still works, too. Yet the default editor for
FreeBSD is not ed - it's not vi(anymore) and it's not even emacs. It's ee,
which is a more, dare I say, mainstream editor.

>> with the most popular plugins on the planet
>
> The plugins are 'popular' for exactly the same reason as Microsoft "Internet
> Explorer": fools design websites that only work with the things. Avoid sites
> designed by fools, and you have no problems.
>

Yes, and while I'm at it, I should avoid documents made by fools who use
Microsoft Excel, and Word. I'd love to, but as egotistical as I am, the
world doesn't seem to be accommodating me.

>> Should thing like libmap.conf really go in /etc ... or should it be in
>> /usr/local/etc, or even, /usr/compat/linux/etc?
>
> No, why? Have you read the libmap.conf(5) manual page? Does it say anywhere
> that it's only for mapping libraries which happen to come from the ports tree
> or have anything to do with Linux binary compatibility? The only times I use
> libmap.conf(5) are when some library version has been bumped in -current and
> I'm feeling too lazy to rebuild everything linked to it.
>

I'm not necessarily lazy to read man pages, or to rebuild everything on
my system every time I want one package to work. It's just that I
typically get in over 70 hours per week working in one form or another
while maintaining my household, which includes being the majority
caregiver for my 93-year-old father-in-law. I'm tired, stressed, and
annoyed at the attitude that it's just no fun getting something fairly
mainstream to work without spending hours googling and perusing man pages.

>> In the meantime, I can develop, say wxPython applications - but I still
>> can't hit a website with Flash content.
>
> Good. Macromedia doesn't want you to use Flash on FreeBSD anyway.
>

True. But I want me too. This isn't a rant about whether or not Macromedia
should be consigned to the seventh ring of hell. It's more about whether
FreeBSD can make the claim to suitability as a desktop O/S without
constraining the definition of desktop to "hey, I can drag console windows
around with my mouse while using vi and lynx". Yet the attitude that
"I don't like Macromedia and plugins in general therefore it's OK
that the ports are broken" is exactly what is frustrating to those of us
who argue for the use of superior software to provide, what by many
standards is an inferior experience. Look, for technical and
philosophical reasons I don't want Windows running on my machines - or
even on my tiny home network. But is it so unreasonable to suggest that
some fairly mainstream things that allegedly work, actually .... work?

Conrad