>> My point here is that I generally don't bother asking other team members
>> about problems, because they apparently know less about computers than I
>> do. (As absurd as that is...)
>
> Well, I don't think it's absurd, because you do quite well when you apply
> yourself.  Being isolated also makes it difficult to become part of a
> coherent team.

It just urks me that I'm part of a team of so-called computer experts, 
and everybody's answer to everything is "did you try rebooting it?" Not 
"hey, let me engage my brain for 15 seconds and see if I can come up 
with a real answer", just "did you try rebooting it?"

And yes, being the only person in the team who works geographically 
isolated really puts the "me" in "team".

>> Or maybe it's just that they're American, and they take the approach of
>> "hey, I could spend hours trying to understand this small problem, or I
>> could just hit it with a wrench until it works". I'm not sure.
>
> Ahem.  You do realise that even though I spell things as those in England
> do, I am in fact American, yes?  Broad brush strokes aren't going to do
> you any favours. ;)

Perhaps an analogy: Takings slightly to extremes, if a car engine broke 
down, I'd take the entire thing apart down to the component level to try 
to figure out what's wrong with it, while the Americans would just buy 
an entire new car and be done with it. Argue amongst yourselves which 
approach is better.

Of course, that's an exaggeration. But those guys do seem reluctant to 
throw any real thought power at the problem when you can just replace 
stuff and see if that fixes it. Maybe they're just busier than me... 
seems to be a cultural thing though.

>>    From what I recall, compiling X11 took about 3 hours on my PC.
>> Interestingly, compiling Firefox took way, way longer than that...
>
> Of course, times have in fact changed, as has hardware.  I remember
> building GCC back in the early 90's on a Sparc 2 system.  It took (IIRC)
> 3 compilation cycles, and could take about that long.
>
> So it sounds to me like you're either stuck back in 1990, or you're still
> using an 8088 to compile with.

No, this was on the same PC I'm using right now - AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ 
2.2 GHz with 3 GB RAM.

> The only tool I used was a kernel debugger.
>
> And a bit of persistence. ;)

In my experience (which, again, is quite limited), it's extremely hard 
to figure out what disassembled code does without source code to compare 
to - and that's on the Motorola 68000 platform, which has sane machine code!

>>>>> So you were a member in what, 1957?  ;)
>>>>
>>>> Yep, that's right. ;-) I may only have been a twinkle in my
>>>> grandfather's eye, but I was sure as heck a LUG member. :-P
>>>
>>> You do know what "sarcasm" is, don't you? ;)
>>
>> Yes. Perhaps you missed mine? :-P
>
> Or perhaps you missed mine. :P

Ko fight!

>> 2. Most people didn't pay actual money to use OpenSUSE.
>
> That doesn't actually matter at all.  People using it, whether they paid
> money for it or not, are going to want help.  And they get it.

Sure. But people who've paid money for something sometimes have this 
attitude of "this piece of crap you sold me isn't working - FIX IT!" 
Whereas most people who get something for free are a little less 
self-righteous about it. (Although not always, sadly...)

>> 3. There aren't as many people trying to use OpenSUSE to actually run a
>> business with.
>
> Actually, quite a few do.  I often am surprised to hear how many actually
> do use the free version to run a business on.

As I understand it, the only difference between that and the commercial 
version is the level of support involved.

>> [Question: Can you actually do that? I mean, I presume the OpenSUSE
>> license doesn't preclude commercial usage...?]
>
> The GPL certainly doesn't forbid it.  Linux - and openSUSE is just a
> Linux distribution - certainly can be used for profit.
>
> That's kinda the point of "Free Software" - you're free to do with it
> what you want.  That's the context of "Free" here - not necessarily "at
> no cost" (gratis), but "libre".

Sure. That's the general idea of a free license. But some licenses are 
freer than others. And different distros have different ideas about 
that. (See, again, Debian classifying POV-Ray as non-free.)

>> HP have support??
>
> Of course they do.  They produce products that are used by professionals
> and consumers alike.  Kinda hard to sell stuff if you don't provide
> people with a way to get help when things don't work.

Sure, but presumably they only *support* your products if you pay for an 
expensive support package?

>>> Never seen that before, and I use VMware on openSUSE quite regularly
>>> (though not to run openSUSE, and not with the host as Windows).  Tools
>>> installed?  Using the VMware-supplied tools, or the OSS version of the
>>> tools?  What version of openSUSE?  What version of Windows?  What
>>> version of VMware?  The mouse is presumably a USB mouse, yes?  Etc,
>>> etc, etc - there are lots of questions to ask about this problem that
>>> help dig deeper into what the root cause is.
>>
>> Literally, create a new VM, set it to boot from the ISO image
>
> So you've basically just described the problem in exactly the same way
> that you did initially.  When clarifying questions are asked, that's so
> the problem can be drilled down into.

The fact that I'm running from the standard ISO image of the live CD 
tells you it doesn't have any VM tools installed. (Unless there are any 
present on the disk itself.) I'll admit I forgot to include the version 
numbers.

> Computers don't tend to do things for "random" reasons.

This is why it disturbs me so when a computer does something for no 
apparent reason. Like booting the same VM multiple times, when it can 
have no record of what happened before, and yet seeing a different 
result each time...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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