Greetings uelsk8s
Wow, works, GREAT JOB. Thank you very much. I am posting this from Opera, though it is OUTDATED....WHY?
This is a brand new download, accomplished this am....
I have some comments, hope these will be viewed as constructive, though they are critical. I wouldn't waste your time, or mine, writing them, if I didn't seek to help you......
First of all, it really is very well done, and I congratulate you. These criticisms, are by and large just idiosyncrasies, and most of them can safely be ignored.....This is after all, a RELEASE Candidate, so, it is 99% ready to go. My comments are probably better directed to some future release, I suppose......
1. WHY do you exclude the only decent streaming audio player: VLC.... You include every manner of crappy player available, MPLAYER, GNOME MPLAYER, etc, etc, AD NAUSEUM.
HORRIBLE.
See, this is beyond just "bug" report. This is at the heart of the distro. You give people a 64 bit OS, with 16 bit software, and expect us to like it.
I am angry about this decision. IT is utterly stupid.
Please don't waste your time looking at other distros, which may or may not include VLC (though, the best ones all do) as default. Nope.
DO LOOK at VL 7.0 "light", i.e. LXDE, which DOES have VLC, as default player, albeit in a 32 bit OS, instead of a 64 bit version.
Holy Cow, this is really discouraging to observe. Talk about backwards. Failure to communicate. Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.....
How can you expect VL to be appreciated as an up and coming 64 bit Linux distro, if the XFCE (i.e. heavy) version contains crappy "lightweight" audio players, while the LXDE (i.e. light) version contains the robust, full featured, unequivocally top of the line streaming audio player? This is interpreted, at least by me, as suggesting that the architects of the XFCE version, either do not know what they are doing, or, at the very least, have failed to appreciate the capabilities of VLC, which makes me wonder what else have they failed to appreciate? Is that why the version of Opera is outdated?
2. Real bug: ok, this genuine bug, (as opposed to my usual angry denunciations of the utter banality demonstrated by the Vector Linux developers, --i.e. their action, excluding VLC) was reported by me, YEARS ago, seems like, but at least several months back, and yet, still remains.....What kind of impression do you think that conveys? I take the time and trouble to report a bug, and the bug remains.....
Maybe the bug is deliberate. Maybe the user, upon finding this bug is supposed to think: "HURRAH, I know that I am using VL because there's my favorite bug, still present, always dependable....like a dear friend...."
During the installation, the screen (same old screen, some things never change) appears to allow someone to select where to install the GRUB or LILO boot manager.
I choose LILO, I then MUST change the screen resolution, else, the software reverts back to GRUB, annoyingly, but that's an annoyance, not a bug per se, just clumsy design. No, the bug comes next: There is, on the right half of the screen, a little window with the option for the user to select the DEFAULT operating system.....
uelsk8s, what do you imagine the ordinary user of VL is going to choose here?
THREE GUESSES:
Yup, VL is the correct answer, not Windows 98 or anything else. So, what does the semi comatose user select: AHA!! YES, the user chooses VL as his/her
default OS.....
GREAT, excellent. Now comes the bug:
In the lower half of that same screen is another little window, this one on the left side of the lower half of the screen, just below the previous little window situated above it, on the right side of the screen......
So, this little window on the lower left side of the screen, asks the user to confirm (or simply ignore) WHICH operating systems to include with GRUB.....
This user elects to REMOVE Windows 98 from the GRUB menu. I don't want to see Win98 in my Grub menu, in fact, I don't want to see the Grub menu at all. I want it to go directly to VL.
So, then comes the bug.
I have now REMOVED Win98 as a boot option, having previously assigned Vector Linux as my default operating system, and the next item on this screen, is "
NEXT", at the very bottom of the screen. If the user, having commenced at the top of the screen, and working his way systematically from top to bottom, as is traditional, at least in most of western society, then, clicks on "NEXT", before going back, counter-intuitively, to the previous window, above the lower half of the screen, then the user will have a horrible error, requiring a complete re-installation......
What happens is that, in the process of removing Win98 from the menu of GRUB, by means of the little window on the lower left side of the screen, the little screen above it, on the right, TOP half of the screen then changes BACK, from Vector Linux,
which the user had assigned as the default OS to boot, to WIN 98, which is no longer available as an OS from which to choose.
I already elaborated this terrible error, LONG ago.....Why hasn't it been fixed already?
?
3. User MUST enter a password of 6 characters, nothing less will work. There is a tiny sentence to that effect somewhere in the control software, but it is NOT PRESENT on the installation routine. You need to insert that. I found that my user name did not appear, though it was not flagged as an error, when I had typed only a single character for the password, during installation.
I normally throw away distros which demand that I conform to their way of doing things. I don't use passwords. I enable autologin. One character is the most I am willing to type, during the installation routine. More than that, the distro is not having me as a supporter. I refuse to support crap. This installation routine is JUNK.
I made an exception, here, out of respect for VL. Make these changes, or I will not be using VL again.
a. VLC audio player as default, getting rid of the utterly useless ancient junk;
b. correct the error on the installation page, when the user selects VL as default, that's it. That's what the user wants.
c. single character for passwords (whatever the user wants), else, even better, like Ubuntu, AUTOLOGIN as an option, during the installation routine. This installer, had it appeared in 1980, would have been regarded as proficient. Today, it is unacceptable.
CAI ENG
