In my last post, I mentioned that I hadn't gotten around to blogging on my birthday. There's a reason for this. Grab some coffee for a long yarn.
See, I'd gotten a new box, and I was so determined to wait for the 13.0 release of Slackware, that I was content to twiddle with Windows while I waited. Slackware hit final, and I rejoiced. And I actually got Slackware 13.0 installed and running like a top on the new box.
But I was still running my old machine for daily use. The thing with Slackware is, it takes me a month or so to set up before I'm ready to move in. All that geeking around takes time, you know.
This release saw vast changes to Slackware - the package format changed. This meant even fewer packages would be available then. If I wanted anything not included in the 3 Slackware disks (the other three are source code), I'd have to compile it myself. After installing the libraries and dependencies, of course, which I would also compile myself. Dropline, which I praised with tears in my eyes last time, is only caught up with Slackware 12.2. Basically, I'd be reduced to Slackbuilds.
Now, there's normally nothing wrong with that. This set-up would have been the ideal way to go. Leisurely watching the code scroll by on the new machine while I Googled and downloaded tarballs on the old machine, picking over packages and libraries and options, while I listened to Brahms and Mozart (and Zappa) on the hi-fi and sipped my Merlot (or perhaps a Pinot Noir), I would labor for a couple of months if necessary to build My Masterpiece.
Except one snag happened: My old machine died. On my birthday. Right while I was typing: beeee-youuuuu-ooooo. I replaced parts, I pounded the power switch, I did the PC equivalent of CPR and zapping with EKG, I called a priest. Nothing. Bereft of life, it rested in peace.
The taste of Pinot Noir, together with the sound of Brahms, melted away into the distance. There would be no leisurely weeks in the laboratory building the hulking beast of a Slackware power machine now. I have deadlines. Now I needed something I could set up fast, fast, fast - like in 48 hours or so. An emergency Linux install.
As you might guess, that limited my options. Originally, I wanted Fedora. I've run Fedora before and liked it; I also loved Red Hat way back in the day. It's certainly kept Eric over at Binary World happy for years, surely it would work for me.
But then I try to boot the live Fedora 11 CD and get "Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block" blah blah over and over, it never boots. Googled the error. Visited one hundred web pages. Saw one thousand people posting ten each on those pages all saying "I get the exact same error!" Saw all of them be answered by nothing but a dumb shrug "I dunno." Tried burning a different CD. Tried downloading a different ISO (the KDE one). Tried it on a different computer. I always burn everything at the slowest speed, so that's not it. I have burned and run one thousand other Linux CDs and never had this problem. Checked the download against the checksum. Kept having the same problem. There are now three CDs labeled "Fedora" in my trash can.
I would have considered Oracle Enterprise, but every time I Google it, the reviews are all rotten lemons and sour milk. What's with that distro? Is anybody out there running Oracle Linux at home? You'd think the fourth-richest guy on the planet could at least buy himself some better publicity...
It goes without saying that I'm not going for PCLinuxOS - I have enemies in that camp. Mandriva is nice, but their constant pressure to upgrade to paid services always rubs me the wrong way. OpenSUSE is too close to Microsoft's back yard. I can't go with CentOS or Debian proper, because the whole point of getting a new machine was to start using newer software. Even grml, which also uses Synaptic, has given me long-term instability problems, though for six months it once kept me very happy. Zenwalk, ditto, though it's suited for the other family machines in the house as long as I don't frown at it too hard. I would love to have turned to the BSDs, but I don't have enough confidence in my daemon skills yet to stake my career on it. And so on - I eliminated every likely contender.
So, here I am! I think I am probably the the most die-hard power user to have ever adopted Ubuntu as their main system, not counting the Ubuntu development team itself, so this will be interesting. I'll be documenting the misadventures of training this monkey to serve a very different kind of master - next post.
Comments:
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Btw, the old package format still works fine. The new package format compresses better, but I believe the default on SBo is to use tgzs.
And, if you decide to build the monster anyway... twitter @jktheslacker, let me know if SBo is missing anything you really want. I'm pretty good at whipping up Slackbuilds.
Thanks, but I could get the Debian Sid experience by running as fast as I can and jumping into a brick wall.
"All those options have KDE 4.x"... Ha ha ha! KDE, he says! Like that's all I have to worry about is KDE. Slackware 13 has gobs of KDE 4.x. Oh, how simple life would be if KDE was all I needed.
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty
And the PPA repositories together with GetDeb to provide the bleeding edge.
I run PCLinuxOS on the family's machines and while the distro is impressive, the community is most unimpressive!
also, gentoo > slackware. you compile everything yourself, but at least the package manager understands that you simply want those friggin' dependencies, you don't need to sort them out yourself
Perhaps KDE 4.x isn't all that you need, but I would bet that Debian has the rest of what you need anyway. My point was, Ubuntu does not have the KDE4 nor the stability, in my experience, that I would expect for a distro with such popularity. Kubuntu, please don't.
The reference to Sid and a brick wall — not sure I understand. Sid is painful? Sid is rock solid? Sid is for idiots who run into walls?
I haven't played with Gentoo, so I'll be nice. I have had experience with dependency-resolving package managers, though, and I'll happily live the rest of my life tracking them down myself. Removing a text editor should NEVER break the system.
If I want long term support with 1.5 to 3 years cycles between reinstall/set-everything-up-again, I go with an LTS releases.
If I want something a little more up to date, I go with the 6 month releases.
If I want something more bleeding edge, I go with the alternate CD, do a minimal install, then build the system up from there myself, installing packages from the Ubuntu repository, or from alternate sources if those applications are not current enough.
Running into a wall = being painful. There's a reason why they call Sid testing, after all. I'm happy to test on a spare box, but not on my main system with all my work at stake! :)
"I would bet that Debian has the rest of what you need anyway"
Of course it does, but a couple of versions behind. For instance, currently Ubuntu Jaunty has Gimp at 2.6.6, Inkscape at 0.47. Debian Lenny has Gimp at 2.4.7, Inkscape at 0.46.
Now, in my freelance graphic work, I need to stay cutting-edge. It's bad enough competing with all the Photoslop pirates all over the world, I don't need to be competing against newer versions of Gimp, too!
And for my blogging life, I haven't done any Gimp and Inkscape tutorials in awhile. That's because of the radical interface changes that each have undergone - I have too many comments on the tutorials that I have done where people are lost and confused because the menu item I said was there has been moved.
And remember, that's just two packages. I also code in some ten different languages, draw in every graphics package imaginable, emulate a lot of platforms so I can sell 'leet articles about the good ol' days, and so on.
Lots of little reasons like that.
WOW! you actually use GIMP and Inkscape for production work? I am not trying to be a jerk here, I am just amazed and encouraged by your words. I have kept an XP box around for the graphic stuff. Yes I use Pshop and Illustrator, not a pirate tho, benefits of my former employer. I think ill give GIMP and Inkscape a closer look then next time I have graphic work to do.
oh @lefty.crupps I am running Kubuntu 9.04 on a spare computer to play with KDE4, have not had any major issues yet, had some minor issues with Samba.
Don't know me very well, do ye? :)
Yeah, Gimp and Inkscape for production work. Also POVRay and Blender for 3D, Image Magick for batch scripting, MakeHuman for human posing, Xara Xtreme for some vector work, and bizarre other sundry apps, including SWFTools for Flash work.
I draw my webcomic, Doomed to Obscurity with Inkscape. I have many 3D modeled/raytraced images in my wallpaper gallery; this one, for instance, was straight POVRay and Gimp. This one is pure Inkscape. (But most of the wallpapers are ancient - I mean to reboot the gallery one of these days).
Also, every image in this site's design is done with FOSS tools. See that spinny-gear Flash animation thingie in the sidebar to the right? Inkscape, POVRay, and SWFTools. And the program that built it is in Bash!
Further adventures in FOSS graphics I document in graphics tutorials and flash. In fact, I get freelance work all the time based on stuff I exhibit on this site.
If you're wondering why I haven't done a heck of a lot more, well, writing still pays better and I can write a lot faster than I can draw. But part of getting a new box in the first place is to have something that can sling those bits 'n' pixels a lot faster, so we'll see what this new era brings.
Update 10/13/09: Here's a nice guy and gal who do web design, and use Gimp for production work, too. And check their portfolio. See? It happens.
Well, here's a surprise for ya: on gentoo, it doesn't. It can't. If you uninstall a package, you only uninstall that package, and none of its dependencies. You can do that later using a --depclean action.
Further, if something depends on the package you are uninstalling, some package managers you can use on gentoo (like paludis) check whether or not this is actually a dependency of another package, while others don't (I think emerge doesn't... at least it didn't use to). Of course, if you're sure you want to uninstall that package, you just use a bit of force in the shape of a --unsafe-uninstall flag (this is paludis-specific, but I'm sure pkgcore has something like this too, if it checks whether uninstalls are dependencies).
OMG
Anyway, as you know, I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now, since I had similar installation problems with Fedora 5 -- things don't change, do they.
The nice thing about Ubuntu is that it's still Linux, you know. You don't have to use Gnome or KDE if you don't want to ...
