maybe I’ll stick with Gnome a little longer; I think I actually need to install Ubuntu on a slightly newer machine - it’s doing well on the old one at them moment, but I think some of my problems might be related to hardware support.
Ouch. You call them arcane commands, I call them learning how computers really work.
dropzone, your statements do not address the question in the OP.
Please note that suggestions to install Windows, in a thread where the OP asks a specific Linux question, is not appreciated in GQ.
The next such response will receive a formal warning.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Chill, dude. It was a riff on Mangetout’s “You’ve got to the point where most Windows users give up, wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows.”
Yeesh!
I have to say I’m pretty impressed with Synaptic; I’m still having problems with this particular installation (the network card keeps disappearing and the DNS settings keep reverting to defaults), and I’m a little bit unsettled by the way Ubuntu simply doesn’t let you log in as root - I know you should never log in that way anyway, but not even having direct access to the root account seems a bit scary.
Still, it’s a perfectly usable desktop system, in fact, I’d probably use Ubuntu in preference to Windows if I was asked to set up a machine for web, office and email only - say for a not-particularly-computer-savvy relative - partly to keep costs low, but also from the POV of stability.
You do have direct access to the root account. Whenever you run a program with sudo, you’re running it as root. The only noticeable difference from su is that your $HOME is maintained so that it feels like the same user.
To get a root shell, run sudo -s, sudo su, or sudo su -. The last of these should be practically indistinguishable from logging in as root.
Also, in case you don’t know, you can get back to the old way simply by running sudo passwd -u. I don’t know why you would, though, unless there is some program that requires you to enter the root password even if it is being run as root.
Thanks for that; I expect I’ll get used to it; it’s just that, as a Windows user with administrative access by default, I only really just got used to the idea of su- in Linux and I started to like it. I suppose it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other though, because the user doesn’t have automatic root access this way - there’s still a prompt.
Next step is how to install something packaged as .rpm in this distribution - I get a message saying rpm is disabled in Debian and that I should use something else (I forget what) to convert it.
Mangetout: Here’s a less-obvious way to log in as root even if the distro doesn’t want to allow it:
[ol]
[li]Grab tomsrtbt and use dd to get it onto a floppy (‘dd if=tomsrtbt.raw of=/dev/hda’ or something).[/li][li]Boot off of that floppy. Your BIOS might require some handholding. I have no idea how to help you here, as each BIOS is different.[/li][li]Mount your hard drive partitions once you’ve logged in to tomsrtbt. (They should be something like /dev/hda1, which is the first partition of the first hard drive. Type ‘mount’ at a command prompt to find out what your specific system looks like.)[/li][li]Do whatever you need to do. You can restore a dead system this way.[/li][/ol]
Debian relies on the dpkg family of package maintenance. If you use a GUI, you want to look for synaptic. From the command line, you can use apt-get or its older cousin dselect. If you need to convert an .rpm to a debian package, you might want to look into the alien program (I’ve never used it, just know that it exists).
Aha! I’m going to try that tomorrow; Synaptic is working well for me so far; used it to install Audacity (sound editor) without a problem.
Derleth, I just aborted a large download with Aptitude, and when I restarted the download it picked up precisely where it had stopped.
Very good. Thank you.
Apt-get will do that too, not only with downloading binaries, but also with index updates. I used Debian for a while while I had 26k and that was a very convenient feature. The binary packages were smaller than the source files I download now in FreeBSD too. (I’m on DSL now so it doesn’t matter, and if it did, I’d just download FreeBSD packages instead of source.)
OK, so alien managed to convert my .rpm to a .deb package; I even managed to type dpkg -i [package name] and it seemed to work, but the installed program won’t run; it says: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc+± libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
Grrr.
(I’m trying to install Phoenix BTW)
Hope it’s OK to post this in this thread? I’m assuming the OP’s question regarding GAIM has been satisfatorily resolved?
Do you have those libraries? Have a good check through with synaptic by making good use of it’s wonderful search function.
No; I’ve got a lot of similar ones, but with subtle differences in the version numbers (and these are installed already). I’d like to have a go at getting Synaptic to install the .deb package, but I just can’t seem to work out where to put it in order to have it find it.
From the install section of the apt-get man page:
I’m sorry – I don’t have time right now to go into more detail. Perhaps someone else can explain some of the nuances of using the apt-get tool. If I get the chance, I’ll drop in later (may be a day or two) with more. Welcome to the Linux version of dll-hell.
Also, I should point out that I’m using Debian; while I believe Ubuntu (which I think is what you’re using) is Debian based, I’m not entirely sure they’re exactly the same. (Though I can’t understand why they’d change apt.)
A couple of things. First, you should not use Synaptic to install a package you have on your hard drive. Synaptic is a front-end for apt, not dpkg.
Second, I suspect that unless you are an expert you won’t have much luck fucking around with the standard C/C++ libraries. At least, I wouldn’t attempt it. If you get lucky and find the right .deb, then dpkg will tell you whether it will work; but otherwise, you are probably stuck with compiling it yourself, which could break other software.
Finally, Digital Stimulus is quite right that you are in the Linux equivalent of DLL hell. If you try to install proprietary software on Linux, it is not much better than doing so on Windows; probably worse, in fact. I don’t mean to stir up debate, but Linux’s strength is really in its freedom and openness; take that away, and there is very little that is superior.
Since this is GQ, perhaps I can relieved of some ignorance. I was under the impression that apt used dpkg as its back-end. I generally use dselect for package maintenance; it’s configuration files are found in the /etc/apt/ directory. I have, of course, at least tried apt-get, synaptic, and aptitude for package maintenance. If dpkg and apt are actually different, could you inform me as to what the major differences are (if they’re not simply drop-in replacements)?
One (minor) reason I didn’t say anything else about installing older libraries is that I don’t have time to try it myself first. However, I have certainly had different versions of libraries installed at the same time (not the standard C libs, I think). Now that I think about it, I’m not quite sure how that worked – I’m wondering if the library wasn’t placed in a local directory or if the application didn’t have its own search path that pre-empted the system path. Hmpf. At any rate, this raises a couple questions:
[ol]
[li]If you install an old library, does apt (or whatever tool you’re using) remove the new library?[/li][li]Wouldn’t it be possible to have both libraries on the system, perhaps requiring a modification to, say, the search path for a particular application? (Not that I’m recommending this at this point, but looking for a factual, GQ answer.)[/li][/ol]
And that’s a place no one wants to be. 