Ubuntu user's report

[Ken Moffat]

Matthew Carpenter wrote:

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> Hi Myles,
> Thanks for the *great* cheerleading session.  This distro has been a big
> question-mark for me for a while (and I've yet to receive the free discs
> from Canonical, probably having to do with shipping from South Africa?).
>
> I am *not* an old Debian user.  I have never installed, Potato, Woody,
> or BoPeep (that's the sexy-version). 
> For one about to try out Ubuntu and Mepis, and one wishing to become
> APT/.deb friendly, what are some of the sources you would recommend?  Is
> the GUI packager friendly enough to allow simple browsing through
> available packages?


PMFJI:

Synaptic is the gui package manager, and it's very friendly, with a good 
search feature.

Warning: debian is very addictive.

The terminal commands are:
apt-get update
apt-get install [pkgname]

or

aptitude install [pkgname]

There is also an "aptitude update" which I use but is not always 
supported by certain repositories.

apt-cache search [string]

is a very useful command for finding what's available.

I'd recommend Ubuntu as a great choice for ease of installation and ease 
of use. Gnome is the default, but I'm sure KDE is available in the 
ubuntu 'universe' repository.


>
>
> Starting off with additional source lists to play with would simplify
> value-determination :)
>
> Thanks again, Myles.  This was good to hear.
>
>


In Ubuntu, just have a look at /etc/apt/sources.list. You will see the 
following lines:

# deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu warty universe
# deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu warty universe

If you uncomment the first you can install a whole 'universe' of debian 
packages that have apparently been compiled for Ubuntu. Pretty large 
repository, I guess.


Mepis defaults to kde, and in addition to their own sources, uses 
standard debian packages, I think. It is very nice, with a more 
conventional debian feel, with an enabled root user.

Ubuntu seems a bit more solid to me, but I haven't used either enough to 
be definitive. I went to straight debian 3.0, which is working great so 
far.


--
ken