…and I’m not happy about it.
Oh, its not really Suse’s fault directly. Or Opensuse’s fault specifically. In fact it is a combination of faults, including my own. But mostly, it is Novell’s fault.
You see, I cannot live without iFolder. And I realize that now, more than ever.
Aside: Here are two great links for catching up on — and following the progress — this conundrum:
I live in a world of mostly Linux computers, with a handful of Windows computers, and I use iFolder (as you’ve probably noticed from past posts) to keep my personal data world perfectly in sync between these OSs.
When Opensuse 11.1 came out a couple months ago, I jumped right on it as I always do for their new releases. As nice as it was/is, it took me a frustrating week or so to realize that no matter how much I hacked at it, I could not make the iFolder stuff work on my new installation. Argh.
Why? It’s because of many of the aspects of iFolder (and the sub-requirements thereof) require GTK stuff (GNOME stuff) from the last release. If you run KDE, you can back-rev enough of the components to get by. Well, I don’t and I can’t. And I won’t. Why in the heck can’t there be a command-only version of iFolder, disassociated from the GUI (like JungleDisk)? If that were the case, I’d certainly have been able to get it working as a background-only process, and that would be fine. In fact, that would be preferred. In fact, now that I think about it, that would be awesome.
Now, a couple months later, I’m still forced to try and remember that every time I change a file on my Opensuse 11.1 laptop, I need to copy it up to my iFolder server Web Access interface. Jeez, like I can remember to do that…
So, as home/documents directories on my two OSs grow further and further astray, I become more and more frustrated, and feel more and more out of control. I have come to the conclusion that I *have* to go back to Opensuse 11.0, where I am able to hack together the iFolder client to work just fine.
Honestly folks, this is just a rant. No point to make other than how frustrated I am. And how I wish Novell would have thought this through beforehand. And how I wish Novell would have kept feeding the source code to the public (as required) so that this would not (or at least should not) have happened. And how I wish somebody smart were still compiling the code for iFolder versions 3.4 or 3.6 or 3.whatever for the new Opensuse 11.1.
I’m going to keep hoping, but I’m not holding my breath. Now where’d I leave that 11.0 net-install iso….?
Argh.
UPDATE, 20090323: There’s hope!!! See this:
http://zonker.opensuse.org/2009/03/23/update-on-ifolder/
UPDATE, 20090331: Source code has been made available again…
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/ifolder3/index.php?title=Subversion_Instructions
UPDATE, 20090401: No fooling, the iFolder site has been re-launched, and the project re-vamped…