[CLUG] Microsoft's failings/network monitoring

[Peter Flynn]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, you wrote:
> Are Microsoft's failings, and dodgy ISPs, the only thing we have to talk
> about on this list?

Good point. 

I still want to know why linuxconf apparently can't be run from an X
server on a Win PC (Reflection X, which runs everything else we fling
at it). 

I'd like to know why I can't click on the loudspeaker in my KDE taskbar
and change the volume on the CDs I play. It says "kmix: Could not open
mixer. Perhaps you have no permission to access the mixer device. Login
as root and do a 'chmod a+rw /dev/mixer*' to allow the access."  But my
/dev/mixer* are _already_  crw-rw-rw-, so this is clearly garbage.

KDE also has a garbage setup for the CD-ROM and floppy disk icons which
it puts on the desktop, as these are inaccessible except from root
(the device permissions are set correctly). This would be normal if
this was a classical multi-user Unix host, where you don't want users
to access such devices, but it's not, it's a single-user laptop. The
designers of KDE clearly haven't grasped yet that Linux gets used
as a single-user workstation infinitely more than it gets used as a
multi-user host, and allowed for a setuid root CD and floppy setup. What
are these people smoking?

Maybe it's in the docs somewhere, but the KDE search is appalling. The
problem is that they've got the principles wrong as well as the
implementation.

///Peter