Flutterby™! : User Linux 2004-02-17 22:48:36.638354+00

User Linux

2004-02-17 22:48:36.638354+00 by Dan Lyke 11 comments

I had all of these things about the gay marriage thing in San Francisco that I was going to post, but I'm still trying to organize my thoughts, so I'll post about what I've been doing instead.

I installed Debian for Charlene at home. The only thing missing is QuickBooks, if the environment suits her then we'll find a way to run it, maybe by paying CodeWeavers some dollars. I was shocked at how easy it was to set up printing, actually easier than Windows, which is quite a change from how it used to be. Further updates on Linux as a desktop environment as this evolves.

I do have to figure out why OpenOffice.org refuses to see one of the fonts, though.

Aaand, for a work project today I downloaded Knoppix. I realize I'm late to the party, but... wow. Everyone needs one of these CDs in their bag of tricks.

#Comment Re: made: 2004-02-18 05:00:26.288138+00 by: meuon [edit history]

I keep giving Knoppix CD's out.. They say 'so what' when I give them out.. and '!%$!! S%$Q!@ That's Incredible!' after they boot it. Of course, most of the modern generation doesn't remember running off of floppies.. and if you were elite , having two, one for boot and run, one for data.

QuickBooks is a mission critical piece.. that even I have a nice laptop running XP dedicated to. I've heard of limited success using Wine for it. Not tried it myself.

Everyone is always late to the party when it comes to the vast world of Linux. No matter what cool thing you discover, there are always hundreds of people out there who have been using it for two years longer than you knew it existed.

Yippee! A Debian thread! Now I can ask all my Debian questions... Let's start with apps. Does anybody have good repositories to recommend? I've been running Libranet

for awhile here - as a desktop, but not my primary desktop - but I have the same problem I've had with every other distro but Red Hat

: I can't find the apps I want, in the versions I want.

threads with Debian and version numbers are useless anyway, 'cause Debian is so nice to pick the versions for you. You could switch to unstable, but if you're still not happy, you could search some of the repositories on www.apt-get.org. I allways found out that adding extra, experimental, repositories isn't worth the hassle. Apt-build and dpkg-buildpackage are fine utilities anyway to build your own versions from source.

Shawn, go for the "unstable" repository, then learn about apt-get source and dpkg-buildpackage. This will get you relatively recent versions, and let you build what you want backdated versions from from source. Despite the monicker, "unstable" is what's made it out of "testing", is what most developers are building against, and while sometimes you'll get funky-ass dependency loops (capital "Q" in dselect is your friend) in general it works pretty darned well.

I've used extra repositories for development stuff that I wanted to run yesterday's patches for but was too lazy to compile myself. If the repositories are kept up, that's great, but often on projects where I want to be that bleeding edge I need to be doing patching anyway, so building my own packages is the direction I go. And apt-getting the source and patching in whatever I want from version control repositories is a good way to set up the framework myself.

I've built stuff from source before, but as a desktop-user I don't want to and don't feel I should have to. On other platforms I don't have to build stuff from source. Sure, maybe if I wanted the latest bleeding edge, but I generally just want the latest release version.

I'd already added the unstable repositories, and some from the "official" lists. They've gotten me closer, but I was wondering if anybody here had any favorites.

Um... does anybody have any recommendations about how to deal with an apt-get install(? - I'm using Synaptic, and I don't know the exact corresponding apt-get invocation) that gets interrupted by a power failure?

I was installing/updating a large collection of apps and I kept forgetting that the process was running (since it's not my main desktop). Periodically, throughout the week I kept switching to my Libranet

box to find that it was waiting for some installer script input from me - and then promptly forget about it again when I got re-involved in my Windoze project.

Last night the power apparently went out (for less than 5 minutes, since my UPS-protected Windoze box was fine) and now I'm sure various things were left in a part-way installed state.

Relax. I've done similar things, and I'm fairly sure that the installer stuff is pretty much "commit/rollback" scale. The only thing you might have to do is manually download a package and do a dpkg --install --force-xxx ... (where "xxx" is some set of arguments about overwriting that I don't have off the top of my head) if things get totally mucked up.

Except for the occasional circular dependency or repository being in a halfway updated state causing unmet dependency issues it's an amazingly robust system.

Good advice, although part of the problem is that I don't remember what the packages were.