Help! Sourceforge has completely defeated me

[Lakshmipathi]

Why do they have to make everything so complicated? Do they enjoy making poor amateurs like me feel stupid and incompetent?

ha..ha. but you are quite true,I strongly believe they need something like HOW TO with podcasting or HOW TO videos on you tube

hazel, you can raise a ticket or reach from directly on support mail address mentioned below.
Support ? sourceforge

[elija]

Why do they have to make everything so complicated? Do they enjoy making poor amateurs like me feel stupid and incompetent?

It probably makes sense to the SourceForge guys and to the hard core full time coders. I would guess that they don't realise that hobbyists can find it confusing.

If they are worth half their salt they would welcome feedback to help make the site better for anybody to use.

[Lakshmipathi]

Hi Hazel,
Today I downloaded barbarella from elija's thefifthcontinent.com.

I did "cmm" - When i ran the command - i got the following message

debian:~/Desktop/barbarella-2.0.1# barbarella
/root/.barbarella.conf: No such file or directory

How to install barbarella on my debian lenny. ?

[hazel]

What's cmm? I don't know that command. And where are you getting the error? During installation or in use?

You'll have to be very patient waiting for the answer. I've temporarily lost my broadband connection so I'm only visiting occasionally at the moment.

[Lakshmipathi]

Sorry,I should have been more clearer,I used configure,make and make install.
It compiled & installed but when i tried to run the command. It gave the above error.

No problem,take your time.

[Rubberman]

Hazel "I'm just a little old lady; don't try to dazzle me with jargon!" - would you rather we just try to bamboozle you with bs? I like SF a lot, but you are correct in that they make it difficult for newbies - they take too much for granted. Sorry folks, but my mental telepathy powers started waning when I reached 40, and that was a couple of decades ago!

[hazel]

Right! You need a configuration file to tell barbarella what buttons to put on the bar, what pixmaps and tooltips they should use and what commands they should execute. By default, this is $HOME/.barbarella.conf, but you can use another name if you supply it as a runtime argument.

There is a specimen file in the documentation to show you the syntax. If you have ever configured fluxbox, you will recognise it. Briefly, you put in a line for each button, with the name/tooltip in parentheses, the pixmap (png or xpm) in angle brackets and the command in braces. I find that 36x36 pixmaps give a reasonable appearance.

The trashcan and mount-tool have to be separately launched. There's a man page with details.

Good luck.

[Lakshmipathi]

hazel,I couldn't find a man page

man barbarella

didn't work for me.

So i just copied the specimen file and renamed it as ~/.barbarella.conf
and executed the command - It's worked like charm

I wouldn't get much time to peek into source code and customize it.
I'll check and get back to you with more comments/feedback

[hazel]

hazel,I couldn't find a man page

didn't work for me.

I'm puzzled. I just checked the makefile in the src/doc directory of the package and it should have installed three man pages in /usr/local/man:barbarella.1.gz, trashcan.1.gz and mount_tool.1.gz. Are you sure they're not there? If they haven't been installed I suggest you copy them over by hand.

I'm glad the specimen config file worked for you. Of course we are both using Lenny; it probably wouldn't work with a different distro.