I surrender

Fri Apr 29 06:04:10 UTC 2005

I give up! Tomorrow I'm going to start looking for another 
distro to try on my laptop, probably Mandrake or Redhat. I have 
been using Lunar on my servers since the 1.2 iso came out, and 
will continue using for my server, but for a desktop with X, 
well....

Two months ago, my employer presented me with a brand new Dell 
Inspiron 6000 laptop. Having a 60 Gig drive, I was elated that 
there would be enough space to make it multi-boot so I could use 
Linux for everything other than the few things that gave me no 
choice.

So, I grabbed a copy of Partition Magic and shrunk the NTFS 
partition down to 10 Gig and grabbed the CD of my favorite Linux 
distro - Lunar. Things went quite well through the basic install 
even thought there were some minor glitches getting the NIC to 
work. Even the switch to the 2.6 kernel and patching it for mppe-
mppc went relatively smooth. All was well, I had a good base 
system, complete with drivers for both the wireless (using 
ndiswrapper), the hardwire networking, and even successfully 
connecting to the office PPTP tunnel.

I decided to get a KDE desktop up. Not too bad, a few hangups 
with dependencies and some struggles getting it configured for 
my oddball 1280 x 800 wide screen video. Things seemed to be 
working fine.

Then the problems started, the new KDE update came out in 
moonbase. The lunar upgrade took most of a night to upgrade, but 
then I could no longer log in under KDE. As soon as I would try, 
X would crash and restart. The log said something about an 
authentication error. After fighting with it for a few days, I 
ended up with X (Xorg) working, but only with a default desktop, 
not KDE. After trying to re-lin KDE hoping that it would solve 
the problem, I still could not get KDE to start.

Well, after two weeks of frustration, I decided to take drastic 
steps and wipe out the Linux install and start fresh.

Installing KDE after gettng the base OS back on went fairly 
well, even though there were a couple of missing dependencies. 
Everything went well until I rebooted to level 5 and tried to 
log in with KDE. Actually, the login worked alright, but about 
half way through the "initializing peripheral" part, KDE and/or 
X crashed, restarted and presented me with a login screen again. 
Not a hint of what went wrong showed up in any of the logs. 
After re-linning most of KDE with no improvement, I decided to 
try installing gnome2, after all, gnome is a good workable 
desktop. That was five days ago. Again, there were missing 
dependencies and modules that couldn't download. Tonight's 
frustration comes from the compile of cairo (required by firefox 
which is required by gnome2) It fails with:

 gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I. -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wnested-externs -fno-strict-aliasing -O2 -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -MT cairo_glitz_surface.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/cairo_glitz_surface.Tpo -c cairo_glitz_surface.c  -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/cairo_glitz_surface.o
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_cairo_glitz_surface_get_image':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:122: error: structure has no member named `red_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:125: error: structure has no member named `alpha_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_glitz_operator':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:310: error: `GLITZ_OPERATOR_SATURATE' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:310: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
cairo_glitz_surface.c:310: error: for each function it appears in.)
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_glitz_surface_create_solid':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:325: warning: implicit declaration of function `glitz_surface_find_similar_standard_format'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:325: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
cairo_glitz_surface.c:329: warning: implicit declaration of function `glitz_surface_create_similar'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:329: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_cairo_glitz_surface_create_similar':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:354: error: structure has no member named `read'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:355: error: `GLITZ_FORMAT_READ_OFFSCREEN_MASK' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:358: error: structure has no member named `draw'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:359: error: `GLITZ_FEATURE_OFFSCREEN_MULTISAMPLE_MASK' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:360: error: structure has no member named `multisample'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:360: error: structure has no member named `multisample'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:361: error: `GLITZ_FORMAT_MULTISAMPLE_SAMPLES_MASK' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:364: error: structure has no member named `draw'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:366: error: `GLITZ_FORMAT_DRAW_OFFSCREEN_MASK' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:371: error: structure has no member named `alpha_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:375: error: structure has no member named `red_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:380: error: structure has no member named `alpha_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:380: error: structure has no member named `red_size'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:387: warning: implicit declaration of function `glitz_surface_find_similar_format'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:387: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
cairo_glitz_surface.c:391: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
cairo_glitz_surface.c:397: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_glitz_composite':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:457: warning: passing arg 4 of `glitz_set_geometry' from incompatible pointer type
cairo_glitz_surface.c:457: error: too many arguments to function `glitz_set_geometry'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:468: error: too many arguments to function `glitz_set_geometry'
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_cairo_glitz_surface_fill_rectangles':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:558: error: union has no member named `mode'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:558: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_MODE_DIRECT' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:559: error: union has no member named `edge_hint'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:559: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_EDGE_HINT_SHARP' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:560: error: union has no member named `primitive'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:560: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_PRIMITIVE_QUADS' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:561: error: union has no member named `type'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:562: error: union has no member named `first'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:563: error: union has no member named `count'
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_cairo_glitz_surface_composite_trapezoids':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:645: error: union has no member named `mode'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:645: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_MODE_DIRECT' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:646: error: union has no member named `edge_hint'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:646: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_EDGE_HINT_GOOD_SMOOTH' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:647: error: union has no member named `primitive'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:647: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_PRIMITIVE_QUADS' undeclared (first use in this function)
cairo_glitz_surface.c:648: error: union has no member named `type'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:649: error: union has no member named `first'
cairo_glitz_surface.c:650: error: union has no member named `count'
cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `cairo_glitz_surface_create':
cairo_glitz_surface.c:922: warning: implicit declaration of function `glitz_surface_get_features'
make[2]: *** [cairo_glitz_surface.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/cairo-0.2.0/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/cairo-0.2.0'
make: *** [all] Error 2
++ Mark Compile stop   : "cairo" "0.2.0" "Fri Apr 29 05:01:35 UTC 2005"

--Richard