Re: [gentoo-user] udev-140

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 16 March 2009 22:20:37 Paul Hartman wrote:
> > I wouldn't really have minded the inconvenience, except that while all
> > this was going on, the largest data centre in the Southern Hemisphere was
> > dropping off the air one router at a time, my desktop machine was
> > panicing after 4 minutes of use (so that's why I stopped using it 6
> > months ago!) and I had to use putty on the GF's Thinkpad to do my bit to
> > rescue all this. Putty sucks, really badly. The only thing that sucks
> > worse than Putty on Windows is Putty on Symbian, even on a Nokia
> > Communicator with a semi-decent keyboard (for a phone)  :-)
>
> What sucks about PuTTY on Windows? I use it all the time and it seems
> to do everything... Granted, I just use it for simple serial port
> devices and SSH stuff, no exotic terminal emulations.

Putty itself isn't too bad if you look at it as a Windows app. It can never be 
anything other than a Windows app and as such is restricted to how Windows 
apps must behave. And therein is the problem - I'm way too used to openssh, I 
want a command line to fire up my ssh client, I want to 'ssh me@there' in a 
console and it must work. I don't want to have to poke around in a vast tree 
structure to enter my options - I know what they are, I just want to type 
them. Without a mouse.

So Putty doesn't really suck in isolation. It does work and can really operate 
any different way. *Using* Putty on it's host platform sucks to someone who is 
used to much more efficient way to accomplish the same task.

> PuTTY on Symbian only does SSH but it seems to do it well enough.
> Running it full-screen with the smallest font is actually not so bad,
> even on my 240x320 screen. Being able to connect to my computer
> wherever I have a cellular signal is convenient... typing with T9 on a
> numeric phone keypad, not so much... but that's the phone's fault, not
> PuTTY's. :P I've been meaning to set up a simple menu script that
> allows me to run all of my common tasks with phone-friendly
> keystrokes. emerge -uDvptN blah blah blah really sucks to tap out on
> the 0-9 keys :) Thank god for bash command history...

On Symbian it's a life saver when all other methods fail. Again, Putty is OK, 
using the device is actually what sucks. I still can't find a pipe character! 
And the screen is almost unreadable (it wasn't three years ago...)


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com