Installing Ubuntu

[pozorvlak]

1100: collect delirium from IT department, now with new hard drive fitted.
Rest of day: move office, attend lectures, etc.
Evening: Attempt to find Ubuntu CD.
1930: start download of Ubuntu iso image on sharleen (wormwood_pearl's laptop). Go to juggling club

Comments

[half_of_monty]

Takes seconds to download the CD image if you live in the ethernet. (Damnit, I now live in the sad world of 1/2 Mb, or will do if it ever gets switched on). I did have quite a bit of arsing about for Duncan to do, though, what with wanting to leave the partition with all my documents on alone. Didn't you?

[pozorvlak]

No, because I'm reinstalling from scratch after a hard drive failure - see line 1. I'd mentioned this before, but only in passing - suffice it to say that the last couple of weeks of my life have been a series of arguments over who gets to use the laptop, and even less work done than usual. And doing all the exercises from SICP on paper, because I didn't have a Scheme interpreter to run my code on.

[half_of_monty]

Ah, not just an upgrade then? The pain! Hope it was all backed up.

[pozorvlak]

Yeah, all backed up, so the worst thing was living without a working computer for an annoyingly long while.

[bdunbar]

collect delirium from IT department,

I thought this was - at first - well thought out snark about your IT department. Heck, you want delirium we've got it here by the bushel load. It's sloshing around in the aisles and spilling out of conference rooms.

Come by and take some, please!

[pozorvlak]

Nah, delirium's the name of my laptop. Named after Dream's younger sister from The Sandman.

[michiexile]

Oh look! Someone else has brilliant taste!

[pozorvlak]

:-)

My old desktop was called Destiny, for much the same reason.

multimedia

[susannahf]

I haven't tried doing multimedia things with my laptop yet. Except that someone wanted to look at a short divx(iirc) on it. I double-clicked the file, it went "I don't have the codecs for that, shall I find them for you?". So I said yes, watched as it fired up synaptic, complete with all the packages it needed. I agreed to them (after realising that it meant "I need all of these" rather than "pick one"!), it installed and Just Worked.
Laziness is a great thing.

[half_of_monty]

Re: installing recursively all dependencies: don't all linux distributions do that? Gentoo does. Can't remember Mandrake.

Not that I recommend Gentoo in any way, unless you want to give up your day job and become a full-time linux hacker. Even if you have your own convenient live-in full-time linux hacker it's a pain.

[michiexile]

It's not THAT horrible.

The resident insane fulltime linux hacker mathematician says.

[pozorvlak]

No, or at least, not historically. I believe the RPM-based distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) now have some sort of recursive installer, but I could never get it to work (certainly not as easily as apt). I don't think they have the fine-grained dependency data (built up over many years) that characterises the .deb based distros and allows apt/synaptic/etc to work so well.

The real point is that Windows doesn't do it at all.

[necaris]

Yep, there's no RPM-based distro that has quite the amount of fine-grained dependency data as the Debian family. I think it's mostly because of the lack of standardization of RPM as a format and distro-specific packaging choices.

That having been said, I'm a longtime Fedora user and yum these days is very slick. There are still some idiotic dependencies in the repositories (e.g. NetworkManager required metacity in a recent update), and Red Hat's graphical tools really suck, but it's very good otherwise.

Of more interest, perhaps, are things like klik and ZeroInstall...