I wrote a message yesterday with the results of the day's testing but somehow it got lost in the ether. I'll include those results along with today's.
I copied a few of the libraries mplayer complained were missing when started from a terminal. I gave up when it wanted a library not on my VL 5.9 partition on this computer (where mplayer is working). I'll wait until a new release of VL 6 includes the needed libraries. Meanwhile, Xine is working for playing music and I've installed AmaroK from the repos and RealPlayer from real.com.
There is no htop and no photo viewer in this release. I installed htop and GQview from the repos. Both seem to be working fine. I downloaded Picasa for Linux from Google. They no longer have a bin version, just rpms and debs. I ran rpm2tgz on the version I downloaded and installed it. Everything looked okay, but when I tried to start Picasa from a terminal prompt nothing happened. Didn't start, no hard drive activity, no error message. I tried various ways to start it (including as root) but nothing worked and I got no error messages to hint why this was. I finally gave up and uninstalled it. I then installed the latest Wine from our repos, downloaded the Windows version of Picasa, and installed that under Wine. Works fine.
Installing a printer from VASM has the same problems as in the last alpha. You get a 404 from the browser, but if you add /admin or /printers to the localhost address you get into the CUPS screens. The graphics are missing, though, just as in the last alpha and in some of the betas for VL 5.9. Very few printers are included. I was able to install my PostScript LJ4 just because I have an HP PPD for it. I hope the rest of the CUPS parts will be in the next release because I'm eager to test printing, plus it's hard for me to make full use of this version without being able to print.
When I start VASM from the desktop icon (the panel icon for VASMCC doesn't work), the resulting window is very small and I have to resize it in order to type my root password and resize it again when VASM comes up. This is annoying.
I installed several of my must-have programs from a few sources. I downloaded a Slackware package for OOo 2.4.1 from linuxpackages.net and installed it. Seems to be working as expected. I installed TextMaker from SoftMaker Office and it's working. I installed Scribus 1.3.3.12 from my own compilation made on a different computer. It complained that there was no GhostScript, so I installed ESP GhostScript, GPL GhostScript, and Gutenprint from our repos. Scribus was now happy and is doing well. I also installed Inkscape .46 that I compiled on another computer. As I started it from a terminal, I had many, many missing libraries. I copied all of them over from my VL 5.9 partition on this computer and Inkscape is now working as expected.
I was hoping that Ghostscript and Gutenprint would enable me to install more printers in CUPS, but no such luck. I did install the driver for my Epson Stylus Color 760 but when I attempted to print a test page, I got a "Unsupported format 'application/postscript'!" from the browser. Looking at Jobs, nothing was sent. So I guess more parts of CUPS are missing than just the drivers. Maybe this will change when I restart the computer.
I installed K3B and Amarok from our repos. It wasn't smooth sailing. There were several dependencies to be installed and GSlapt downloaded all of them but would usually hang after installing a couple. I had to kill the GSlapt process. Then I would start GSlapt again and continue with the installation. It would install another downloaded package and hang again. I had to repeat the process several times before K3B and Amarok were installed.
I installed Google Earth for Linux. I can run it as root but not as user. I don't know why, as the permissions looked okay. I do get this message when I start Google Earth from a terminal:
do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.
Of course, it doesn't tell me how to unset those two things, whatever they are.
As root, it works nevertheless. As user, it loads, puts up a startup tip screen but no type is visible, and loads the program window, which immediately disappears. No messages as to why. I haven't checked the log files yet. Maybe there'll be something there. My video card is an ATI Radeon 9200 with 128 megs. I'm using the xorg radeon driver. I get about 1300 FPS from glxgears running in a window.
VL 6 alpha has been very stable. No system crashes. Not many program crashes. I'm happy with it.
I haven't found anything special in VL 6, though. What exactly is this new version going to gain for us? I'm just curious.
--GrannyGeek
