[sf-lug] problems with refresh rate under Intrepid

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> > You basically ignored -- and more than likely didn't follow -- my point.
> 
> Didn't understand it.  You have to remember that I am basically a very
> simple end user who has lots of trouble with the CLI.

Not a problem.  Just a suggestion, and I hope you take this in the 
spirit intended:

If you don't _understand_ a request, it's better to say "I'm sorry, but
I don't follow [point foo]" than to post 112 lines of stuff that you
have no particular reason to believe is relevant.  Avoids time wasteage.



Getting back to my point:  If, say, someone is having problems with X
configuration, I'm going to say things like:

   OK, does typing 
   lsmod | grep nvidia | awk '{print $1}'
   at a shell prompt produce output like

   nvidia
   i2c_core
   agpgart

   ...or something like that?

And I might say:

   Please go to a shell prompt and do
   cd /etc/X11
   grep -B 2 -A 2 Xinerama xorg.conf

   Does that produce something like this?

   Section "ServerFlags"
       Option         "Xinerama" "true"
   EndSection
   

Or, if the guy/gal is reporting problems with networking, I'm likely to
say:

   Please go to a shell prompt and type the following commands, and 
   copy/paste exactly what they return into a file, and post the 
   file as plaintext, inline in the body of your reply to this message:

   /sbin/ifconfig -a
   /sbin/route -n
   cat /etc/resolv.conf
   cat /etc/nsswitch.conf

I ask for his/her network information in that specific way because 
it's unambiguous and doesn't depend on high-level tools that I probably
don't have (and am not willing to install just for one occasion), and
might not be working right -- and because he/she can convey the exact
state of the system with zero ambiguity using nothing more sophisticated
than a mouse clipboard.

And please note that, in the above, I'm not asking the user to
understand what lsmod, grep, and awk are doing.  I'm just asking him/her
to copy and paste the commands to a shell prompt -- and copy/paste 
back what gets shown.

If, by contrast, the user insists on saying "Well, I go to System 
tools > Network > configuration, and do blah-blah-blah in the fill-in
fields", that's bloody useless, even if the guy offers to send a
screenshot.