When I bought a new laptop recently, the first thing I did was reformat the hard drive and install Linux Mint. Compared to the fail that Windows 8 is, Linux Mint has been delightful to use. But there are still occasionally bizarre barriers that prevent me from recommending that my wife or other people I know give it a try.
For example, this week I wanted to access my Google Drive account on my laptop, and after a bit of searching SyncDrive seemed like the best solution. Except after following the instructions for installation on the SyncDrive website, I kept getting an error message that the software couldn’t run because a “file or directory doesn’t exist.”
A quick Google search found others who ran into the same problem and a possible solution.
The problem is that syncdrive tries to access an update file at pear-news.fr which has now moved to syncdrive.fr. Fortunately this is easy to overcome.
Use a hex editor such as Bless (available in Software Manager) as root and open the file /usr/bin/syncdrive. Then replace pear-news.fr by syncdrive.fr in 3 places and save.
Syncdrive should then run correctly.
Okay, yes, I know how to do that (and was able to get SyncDrive to work), but I can just imagine telling my wife or co-worker, “see, all you need to do is grab a hex editor and do a search and replace . . .” Um, no. Not going to happen.
Oh, God, how much do I love open source geeks that have a sentence that includes “Fortunately this is easy to overcome” and then requires a hex editor.
Exactly.
The other thing is how long simple things like that go unfixed in Open Source project. I get that their project gets popular enough that they move the update files to their own domain. But how does anyone then not bother to update the reference within the software to match? Wouldn’t that be the very first thing any rational developer would do after making that sort of change?
Probably too busy compiling different iterations of Gentoo for fun to notice.