First of my real blog entries on IT … or computing, or anything related to technology really.
I work in computing so it is hardly surprising that I have a few opinions on it (or IT), but I’ll try to restrain myself from getting too technical.
Today’s entry is about how having too much knowledge can actually slow you down when trying to resolve an issue. You see, I had a bit of a problem on my SGI workstation when trying to run GIMP or Ufraw (both of which are essential to doing any kind of photographic work). When trying to use either, the application would crash with a little error message saying that I had run out of memory. This was kind of hard to believe as I have 1.5Gbytes of memory in the SGI, and I was not processing any unusually large files.
However I had recently upgraded the software on my workstation, so my instinct was to blame that. The error message indicated that the problem was with a component called glib so I spent hours recompiling that component using multiple different versions so see if I could eliminate the problem. No luck. I even read the source code to the relevant part of glib and tried a couple of experiments to see what was wrong that way. No luck.
After all that time, I spent some more productive time hunting in the appropriate place to find out my problem was probably related to an IRIXism … rqs which was not written to take into account just how many shared libraries applications based on GNOME use these days. A quick fix using rqsall and all was fixed.
Ignoring all the technical details, my knowledge of how Unix works had led me down the wrong path because all the symptoms seemed to indicate an application problem where the real problem was with the operating system. A quick hunt where all the experts hang out showed where the problem was. If I had looked to begin with, I would have saved myself a great deal of time!
However hunting down the wrong path was useful … it helped me practice some skills which need occasional use.
Oh! Don’t assume that my experience is common with those who use Linux. If you stick to a stable distribution and don’t mess too much you will not see this sort of thing.