Linux doesn’t suck, but it sure isn’t a silver bullet

I keep thinking that I’ll eventually figure SMB out and use my deep and thorough understanding of it to write a clear post that will make legions of people just like me say “ahhh, I wish I’d read this before I tore all my hair out trying to make … work!”

It hasn’t happened yet, though.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what I did right at work to get Beastie talking to the XP machine on our network in the office, but I have a pretty seamless network connection to Karen’s computer at Recycle-A-Bicycle (okay, so it is read only, which is a problem).

I can’t seem to get my laptop, Brahms, talking to Noah’s at home. That is doubly frustrating because there aren’t Linux drivers for the HP All-In-One that he has and I don’t want to get a second printer but I do need to be able to print. File sharing would at least make the process easier, as I’d be able to print to PDF and then pickup my PDFs from his workstation. Of course, if there was a way to get a linux driver written … ? How would that work?

I also haven’t been able to sort out printer sharing at RAB, which is annoying. I can print if I’m connected to the printer, but since my comptuer isn’t on all the time and Karen’s head will explode if I make printing complex for her, I have to access the printer shared over the network. It just hangs.

For bonus whining points, I don’t like the default PDF reader (Document Viewer) because you can’t search for text or do anything but stare, basically. I tried to install another reader but it is such outrageous overkill that I had to make it go away. It had a jillion buttons. Ugh. I just want to search for text, zoom in and out. Cut and paste. Is that so wrong?

These things, none of them makes me want Windows. It makes me want to figure Ubuntu out. And whine. For now I’ll just whine.

Ooh. Ooh. And. I’ve tested out a zillion different text editors for web development: gvim, quanta, screem, scite, bluefish, Kommander. I need something that is functional enough to manage a task like the Recycle-A-Bicycle site migration from Plone to Drupal. That is enough of a feat as it is, I don’t want to fight with my editor. Having tried them all, I setteld back on Quanta, which is just a wee bit smarter than the rest about closing tags for you without getting all up in your business. Quanta, however, relies on Kfilereplace for extended search and replace functionality, and Kfilereplace stinks. Seriously. This is from their docs page on regular expressions (which they widely claim to support):

If you want search for every string that starts with “x”, “ht” or “u” and ends with “ml”, you can write a regular expression like this: (x|ht|u)ml. Insert this expression in the search editor, click OK, and enable regular expressions by toggling the Regular Expression button. Please note that using regular expressions lets you to make very complicated searches, but the cost could be a performance degradation. Regular expression can be very tricky, and it is often the case that “if you want to solve a problem with a regular expression, you have two problems”.

Actually, that is their whole docs page:”How to use regular expressions. Don’t.”

WTF? I actually have more than two problems. I have nine or ten on each of 8 pages, but they are consistent enough that a regular expression could tear through all of them in a minute. But Kfilereplace has no documentation of their preferred regular expression syntax, so I have to close the chunk of pages I was working on, open them in gvim and run my queries there. Why bother saying you support regular expressions if you don’t?