[conspire] Re: Distro help

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ryman (rymanle at gmail.com):

> I'm sorry about the unclear again.

Honestly, you're not unclear.  It's just that communication with the 
technical community to solve problems, in writing, is not the sort of
thing most people are used to doing.  It takes a little pondering to
realise what techies need to know, to help you.

If we were in the same room as you and your computer, we could say
"Excuse me; do you mind if I sit in your chair for a moment?  There's
something I want to try."  Since we're not with you, we have to have you
do things and tell us what you see.  You should bear in mind that we
can't see anything, unaided:  You have to describe things to us -- and 
please avoid sending us your interpretations.

One of the reasons people fall back on sending us interpretations (rather
than the raw symptoms we need) concerns timing:  You have a problem and
only _afterwards_ write for help, so you rely on your memory of what
occurred, which inevitably means you start trying to tell us what you
guessed was happening, at the expense of accuracy in telling us what you
_saw_.

Therefore, very often it's a good idea to write your request for help
_while repeating_ the steps that produce the problem, so that you can
write a description of what is happening _as it happens_.


> - 'All the icons' mean "All the icons" might mean "all the icons
> showing for the downloaded anime files that had until this point been
> on display in my file browser
> window". 
> 
> - I will google on how natulius works to get more information about it.

Don't forget about the Ubuntuforums URL I posted!  They are GNOME users
and are very experienced at helping new Ubuntu users with it.

> - 'Crashed' mean its unresponsive and sometimes vanished from the task bar.

OK, but those are _two_ slightly different things.

"Unresponsive" is interpreting, a bit:  Again, ideally, you will tell us
what you do, in chronological order.  "I do this, then the computer does
this, then I do this...."

> - My firefox crashed ( vanished from the task bar ) as i'm writing
> this reply. I opened another firefox to go to
> http://www.xanga.com/icybabie03 to get some of the URL from the
> comment page.

Well, that page blew my Firefox out of memory, too.

So, it's not just you.  You may be surprised to hear that there's a
great deal of really, really bad HTML out there, that sometimes causes 
even really good browsers such as recent versions of Firefox to
segementation fault or otherwise terminate.

> This window was vanished too. I have to write this again.

Ah, yes, you're using GMail!  I sort of forgot about that, when I
suggested you (in effect) try to blow up your browser process.  
You might want to take notes in a text editor, rather than a browser
window, when you do such things.

> - About 30 minutes before I reply this email. My firefox is
> unresponsive again.  I had xmms, gaim, xchat and firefox running. I was
> just chatting with my friend on AIM then I click on the firefox tab in
> task bar. It maximized and took over the screen. My gnome panel (
> bottom and top ) are disappeared ( it's like when you press F11 to
> view Full Screen on firefox but it isn't. When you press F11 to see
> full screen. you won't be able to see the Menu bar on firefox. But in
> this case I still can see the menu bar and the window border). I still
> can move the cursor. I still can see the  webpage on firefox (
> www.yahoo.com ) but I couldn't type or do anything.

Again, I'm at a small disadvantage in discussing GNOME specifics,
because I don't use GNOME.  Thus, I have only guesses to go by, in
figuring out what you mean by "the task bar", and why clicking its
"Firefox tab" would cause Firefox to take over the screen.  F11 does
entirely different things on _my_ system (for example):  I assure you
that what it does on your system isn't Firefox-specific, but rather
something your window manager is doing.

You may want to bring your machine to the SVLUG installfest (this coming
Saturday), and get some in-person assistance.