[Novalug] compiz, nautilus, gnome issues 'resolved' by reinstall

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 15:15 -0500, greg pryzby wrote:
> I decided to reinstall (thank goodness for /home partition) 8.04 and 
> then upgrade to 8.10 (I had a DVD in a book).
> 
> It appears that all my 'issues' are resolved.

> Anyway, it appears that you *can* really confuse your system and 
> sometimes a reinstall is best (it had been 3.5 iirc)

While reading the Fedora 10 release notes I found an interesting
situation that most of us don't like to see in Linux: A case where
adding an rpm can 'corrupt' the system by replacing an existing, safe,
trusted official file.

The situation occurs when you install third party drivers from
Ati/Nvidia.  According to Redhat:

"Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities
currently (as of ?) replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with
their own libGL. Nvidia's driver additionally installs a replacement
libglx.a X server module, removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in
the process. ATI's driver may or may not replace libglx.a. (if anyone
can confirm that, please edit it in)."

So if you install an rpm from these guys and it causes problems, you
can't just change configuration settings to use the radeon driver
supported by Redhat.. because that file's gone.  This was very common in
the Windows world years ago as adding any given program might replace
something standard and working.  For the most part, Linux has avoided
that.

I suspect most hobbyist users would at this point find it easier to
reinstall and start over than manually remove and reinstall their
X-systems and worry about doing it all right.

FYI.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA