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JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.
Updating my system just hosed my Gnome install (a couple of base packages are missing from the Ubuntu servers, so it's in an inconsistent state). Fine by me - I don't really care about the whole desktop bit, I run ion as my window manager. The one thing that I miss from uninstalling gnome is gnome-terminal.

I tried using Konsole for about 5 minutes, but my god, is it ever clunky. It takes ages to start up and I can't figure out how to turn off its extra window border. Does anybody know a *simple* terminal emulator written in Qt or Gtk+? (Or wxWidgets or whatever.)

The main things I want are:

- UTF-8 output
- practically unlimited scrollback
- not too ugly looking scrollbar
- ability to cut and paste with Ctrl+Shift+C/Ctrl+Shift+V (or something similar)

I've tried uterm, rxvt, and aterm, and they all fail the last two points. I figure if I want Mac/Windows style cut and paste, I pretty much have to use something written with the KDE or Gnome philosophy, but I'd prefer not to use something that has the kitchen sink included like Konsole. (The thing takes 5 seconds to start up! Considering I open and close xterms a thousand times a minute, that's terribly painful.)

gnome-terminal was pretty much exactly what I want (it had more features than I cared about, but they were easy to ignore) but I can't install it right now due to dependency problems, and I'd really prefer not to have to drag in all of gnome just for an xterm. (It depends, indirectly, on Evolution!)

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JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

dfn_doe posted:

I'm confused about what is wrong with konsole? It has a ton of configuration options to make it do just about anything.... Also, try using "shift-insert" and "shift-delete" for copy/paste operations, seems to work on just about everything except OSX....

Well, it doesn't show up very well in this screenshot, but trust me, when you're starting at a ton of these all day it really sticks out:



Also, it takes an extraordinarily long time to start up, and when you right click, the menu is full of options that I don't want and make it look like it was thrown together haphazardly.

However, I think I've found my solution!

code:
#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
from kdecore import KApplication, KLibLoader
from kparts import KParts
from qt import QVBox, SIGNAL

class MainWindow(KParts.MainWindow):

  def __init__(self):
    KParts.MainWindow.__init__(self, None)
    vbox = QVBox(self)
    factory = KLibLoader.self().factory("libkonsolepart")
    konsole = factory.create(vbox, "konsolepart", "KParts::ReadOnlyPart")
    self.connect(konsole, SIGNAL("destroyed()"), self.close)
    self.setCentralWidget(vbox)

a = KApplication(sys.argv, "kterm")
window = MainWindow()
a.setMainWidget(window)
window.show()

a.exec_loop()
I'm gonna have to add some code to bind shortcut keys to cut and paste, but other than that this is just about perfect. It still takes quite a while to start if it's the first KDE app that loads, but after that it's nice and quick, and it doesn't have all the extra cruft that the konsole shell adds - it's just the main widget.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.
I just upgraded my Ubuntu, and now the Gnome System/Quit... menu only has an icon for "Lock Screen" - all the other options ("Log Out", "Switch User", "Suspend", "Hibernate", "Shut Down") just have a blank space where the icon should be. I haven't been able to find any docs explaining where Gnome looks for each icon - does anybody know what filenames these icons should have, or where I should be looking to find out?

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

teapot posted:

/usr/share/icons/<theme>/<size>/<section>
For example, /usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/apps/gnome-session-hibernate.png

You probably used a theme that was removed or renamed over the upgrade, go to the theme configuration utility (gnome-theme-manager) and choose another theme.

Thanks - turns out none of the themes I had installed even included the 48x48 dir. Only the "Human" theme, which is the Ubuntu default, includes them. I uninstalled a bunch of packages that I thought I wasn't using before the upgrade, so I didn't have to waste time downloading updated versions of all of them, and even though I'd switched to a different icon theme it was still falling back to the ones from Human for all the icons that weren't included in that theme.

EDIT: a little more complex than that. If you look in the icon theme directory, you'll find an index file describing the contents (/usr/share/icons/<theme name>/index.theme). One line will be "inherits=<list of themes>" (or "Inherits="). It seems like the themes in the latest version inherit things differently, or something, because the icons only showed up when I actually set the theme to "Human". I had to add "Human" to the inherits line of every other theme I wanted to use.

JoeNotCharles fucked around with this message at 06:04 on May 6, 2007

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Crush posted:

Is there a way to replace the Ubuntu logo with the Footprint logo of GNOME?

Where exactly do you mean? In the boot splash screen, login screen, Gnome splash screen, Gnome menu...?

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Crush posted:

Sorry, I wasn't clear. In the upper left hand corner where the 'Applications' menu is. The reason I want to change it is because I am not a big fan of the brown/orange/whatever theme on Ubuntu, but when I change it to something like a blue theme, the Ubuntu logo stands out.

Ok, I give up. Here's what I wrote first, with the mistake fixed:

quote:

The easy way is to find 6 versions of the icon you want: one at 16x16, one at 22x22, one at 24x24, one at 32x32, one at 48x48 (all of these are .PNG's) and one SVG. It's probably easiest to just find an SVG, import it into Gimp (install gimp-svg if you don't have the SVG plugin) and then export to PNG at the 5 different sizes.

Then copy these files to:

code:
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/22x22/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/32x32/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/places/start-here.svg

/usr/share/icons/Human/22x22/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/Human/24x24/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/Human/48x48/places/start-here.png
/usr/share/icons/Human/scalable/places/start-here.svg
Don't forget to back up the originals first! (You can probably get away with only saving overtop of some of these files instead of all of them, but this will guarantee you've gotten everything.)

Oh, hey, I just found some handy Gnome foot SVG's on my system - they're in

code:
/usr/share/icons/Amaranth/scalable/apps/gnome-logo.svg
/usr/share/icons/Nuvola/scalable/apps/gnome-logo.svg
/usr/share/icons/Wasp/scalable/apps/gnome-logo.svg
(Note that's "apps", not "places", which is why they're not actually used.)

The drawback to doing it this way is that next time you upgrade, Ubuntu will install its standard icons overtop of the ones you just put there, so you'll have to save them and remember to copy them over again next time you upgrade.

The "correct" way is to make a new theme, containing just those icons you want to replace, and set it to inherit from the theme you're using right now. (You might also need to make it inherit from "Human" and "gnome" to be sure it inherits all the right icons, I'm not sure.) Take a look at any of the "index.theme" files in /usr/share/icons/ - it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Then Ubuntu can do what it wants to the standard themes, and your theme will use the icons you've added and go back to the standard ones for each icon that's not overridden in your theme.

But when I actually tried to do this, it replaced the icons in the "Add to Panel" menu, and for the "Main Menu" applet (which is where they just have a single icon, not named menus), but the "Menu Bar" applet (the default Ubuntu one, with the icon and the words Applications, Places and System) it still uses the Ubuntu logo! I have no idea where it gets it from.

JoeNotCharles fucked around with this message at 22:57 on May 6, 2007

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

teapot posted:

You should replace actual files with the images that you want to be used instead of the default logo, not add yet another item to the panel. Logo is a part of the menu bar applet.

I thought that's what I did do. (And I don't know what that last sentence means. Can you rephrase?)

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

teapot posted:

If you have replaced the files, just log out and log in again.

Main Menu applet doesn't re-read the icons when they are changed, so unless it's restarted, it will display the original icon.

I thought I did that. I might have forgotten to the second time I was testing things. If that's all it was, then I'm much less confused.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Twinxor posted:

Heh, let me know if you figure this one out. In theory this is abstracted through an ACPI manager program, but I'm having a hell of a time actually getting one of them to do what I want, because Ubuntu apparently controls it all through scripts I can't seem to find.

They're in /etc/acpi.d. The ones I looked at (volume up, volume down, mute) just called FAKEKEY or something, I guess to just translate the ACPI "somebody pushed a button" event into a keyboard "somebody pushed a button" event, and then Gnome is set up to read the key codes instead of the ACPI events.

I just replaced the "FAKEKEY" calls with "alsamixer" calls directly, which meant that when I hit a button the volume would go up or down but I wouldn't get any on-screen display, but at least it worked when I wasn't running Gnome. (I'm sure there's a better way involving running a daemon to watch for those keyboard events or something, but whatever.)

So the scripts that control the screen brightness should be in there, but what commands to actually call in those scripts I don't know.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

teh_c0w posted:

Is it because my key is NTSF?

Sounds likely.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Alfajor posted:

I'm trying to figure out some C code (basically a if (chmod (file,mode)) ). What is the return type of chmod, and more importantly, what's what? 1 true? or 0 is true?

For most Unix system functions, 0 or higher means success and -1 means failure. It puts the precise error code in the "errno" variable.

For chmod, it's always either 0 or -1, but some others have meaningful return values (like getpid(), where the return value is the pid or -1 on failure.)

You can find the answers to questions like this by typing "man 2 chmod" (if you just type "man chmod" it gives you the first one it finds, which happens to by the shell command. The C system function calls are in section 2, so "man 2".) If you don't have the manpages installed on your system, google for "man chmod" will find online copies.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.
First off, I don't know if "aptitude" is available for Fedora Core, but for Debian and Ubuntu systems you should use it instead of apt-get. It's just a wrapper that tracks some extra state and dependencies, so you use the exact same commands except type "aptitude" instead.

Second, "apt-get update" just updates the list of packages available, it doesn't actually upgrade anything. I believe you want "apt-get upgrade glibc", but I'm not at a computer with apt right now so I can't doublecheck.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Seaneseor posted:

I was just reading man pages and playing around with commands.

It claims SIGKILL can't be blocked, so I tested out how dangerous this command could be by trying to assassinate the head honcho.

Is there something about how 'kill' works that would logically prevent it from killing 'init'? Not because "it's a bad idea", but because "it's not actually possible"?

Of the top of my head, the "init" process is always PID 0, by definition, so I bet the kernel just rejects the kill signal when sent to that PID.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

mirror123 posted:

This might be a pretty specific question, but I've googled around with no results.

Has anyone gotten one of those PSX->USB controllers to work? I have one of those devices that can let you use two playstation controllers at the same time. Ubuntu Feisty gets the device at /dev/input/js0, js1 but doesn't detect any input.

Really just throwing it out there, but hopefully someone has tried setting one of these up.

Mine worked fine (3-in-1 adaptor to let you hook a PSX/PS2 controller to X-box, Gamecube or USB). Actually, I only tested it in snes9x, which was only set to recognize one of the analog sticks anyway, so maybe the other one and the d-pad didn't work and I never noticed.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Anal Wink posted:

:?: Question: I'm about to install on a 700gb drive. It'll mostly be used for a media share for my xbox, but I'm also going to play around with Xen.

Should I put /homes on its own partition, and if so, how much do I give /? Would all the rest of my Xen images be stored in my user directory?

For a home computer, I wouldn't bother. The main point of separating them would be so that if one of your partitions gets corrupted, you don't lose the other one. Obviously, this has the most effect if the other partition is actually on a separate drive, which it sounds like it won't be.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

nex posted:

I have a quick question:

I want to run Ubuntu on my laptop. The only problem is that I have Vista installed and I only have one partition. Preferably I would like to partition the drive without having to reformat and screw up the Windows installation. I gave Wubi a quick try but the Vista support is scetchy to say the least and it didnt work.

Partition Magic can partition the main partition. The problem there is that its way old now and it doesnt play nice with Vista.

So what should I do? Just bite the bullet and do a format to get proper partitions or is there a simpler solution for me?

Try colinux. Dunno how it works under Vista, though.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

skroll posted:

mc's ftp client is pretty terrible, and you should really be using lftp over ncftp anyways. See what happens then. If that doesn't work, turn off PASV mode in lftp and try again.

Why is lftp better than ncftp?

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

kapinga posted:

Does anyone know what
code:
libusual: modprobe for usb-storage succeeded, but module is not present
is about, or how to fix it. This message shows up in the logs at every startup of my fileserver, and after that, the USB drive fails to mount. I have to run "modprobe usb-storage", and the device pops right up.

How do I go about fixing this? I just made a clean install of Fedora 7, and the current kernel is 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7, I think.

If you guys want more information, just ask. I just thought these were the most important parts of the current problem.

Easiest way off the top of my head is to add "usb-storage" to /etc/modules - that will automatically load it at boot time. Or it might just give you the same message at boot time, but I guess it's worth a try. It's weird that it can load fine from the command line, but not when "libusual" triggers it.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Twlight posted:

At work we have alot of systems, and since these systems are referenced by ip address mostly (due to snort's web frontend) I was thinking of creating a local whois server just so BASE can interface with it. Whats the quickest way to go about this in linux.

Uh, what exactly do you need from the whois server? If you have the name and want the IP, you need DNS server. If you have the IP and want the name, you need reverse DNS. whois won't help you - it just tells you who's registered a domain name.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

InferiorWang posted:

Is there a command to barf out a list of the hardware running on a machine?

Try "lshal" or "lshw". lshal is a command-line interface to the modern Hardware Abstraction Layer, while lshw is black magic of some sort.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

invid posted:

I'm trying to configure mrtg-mailstats for my server, and its telling me to find a sendmail.cf file, but for some reason, after doing a

code:
find / | grep sendmail.cf
I get no results.

Any idea how can I go about configuring mailstats?

Are you sure you're actually running sendmail? Every modern Linux distro I'm aware of has switched to something easier to configure (such as qmail, exim or postfix).

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

SheriffHippo posted:

I'm not kidding :( I like doing pointless hobby things with my computer, you know, nerding out and so forth.

You really need to try something like ion.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

skroll posted:

I know you were trying to find something obscure here, but I just installed ion2 and have been playing around with it. I actually really like it. Very minimal, and very quick. I like not having to click anything except while in firefox.

No I wasn't - I use ion at work. It's awesome for programming.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

skroll posted:

It's pretty awesome for even day to day use. Works pretty well, as I find I really don't need a windowed gui. However, is there a way to split a root frame? For example, I split the frame horizontally, and then I want to create a third frame on the right side. Is it possible to do this?

I don't believe so - the only way I know is to move all the tabs out, out of the bottom frame, close it, and then do the vertical split first and then re-do the horizontal split. You could probably make a macro using Lua that does this automatically, but it'd be a bit of work.

There are a couple of other things I dislike about ion. For instance, I don't see any reason modal dialogs shouldn't show up as separate tabs that can be moved from frame to frame - often a dialog will pop up and I'll want to see what's behind it, and I just can't. I've been meaning to take a look at some of the other tab-and-pane window managers, but I've just never gotten around to it.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.
Recent versions of Linux can read HFS+ (the native OS X format).

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

crazysim posted:

Why not go the full length and use NTFS? Windows, Linux (NTFS-3G), MacOS (NTFS-3G with MacFUSE) . Read and write on all!

I guess I've just been seeing "NTFS write support is disabled by default and is EXPERIMENTAL" in the kernel options for so long that I still don't fully believe it's safe...

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

teapot posted:

Those are two different drivers. NTFS-3G on both OSX and Linux is stable, and works through FUSE (filesystem in userspace). Direct NTFS support in Linux kernel is an old driver that is still only usable in read-only mode.

Too lazy to look this up right now - can I format a filesystem to NTFS with NTFS-3G, or do I need Windows for that? I've got some old disks lying around that I'm thinking of throwing in a USB enclosure and turning my roommate's Mac into a file server, and I figure I might as well keep it Windows-compatible for when friends bring laptops over.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

sund posted:

With samba, every filesystem is Windows/Mac/Linux compatible. That's how I ended up going when I wanted to do something similar.

So I can plug a USB drive into a Windows machine, no matter what filesystem is on it, and... mount it through Samba? What?

I know technically all I need is a Mac-readable filesystem, but what if the Mac breaks down (it's a G3, pretty old) or my entire network goes down or something? I'm just looking for flexibility.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

sund posted:

Share it via samba from one of your computers and everyone can use it over the network simultaneously and without swapping USB cables.

I know technically all I need is a Mac-readable filesystem, but what if the Mac breaks down (it's a G3, pretty old) or my entire network goes down or something? I'm just looking for flexibility.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Furd_Terguson posted:

code:
cdrecord -v dev=6,0,0 driveropts=burnfree file.iso
But I want to replace "file.iso" with the actual filename I type in. Browsing to the directory will be done manually, so the file itself will be in the current directory. I tried googling but the guides can be quite involved and I assume this will probably be fairly simple. Thanks for any help.

Just put "%1" in your script instead of "file.iso", and that will be replaced by the first parameter of the script. (So if your script is called "dvdrecord", use "dvdrecord somefilename.iso")

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

thenameseli posted:

"$1" :eng101:. %s are for Windows batch script variables(?)

How the hell did I do that? I don't even use Windows!

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

invid posted:

wouldn't
code:
rmdir /mnt/newhome
actually destroy the directories?

Yes? That's the point - after you've unmounted the disk, why have /mnt/newhome hanging around?

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

The Madness posted:

Hey, I'm a complete linux noob, but I've had to deal with it a lot lately at this internship I'm doing. Today I was trying to install pygame, but the package installer says 'error: Dependency is not satisfiable: python' I'm pretty certain that I have the latest version of python installed, so I don't know why I would be getting that error.

On a related note, I don't think I have all the dependencies for pygame (a bunch of sdl stuff, I don't really know whats going on), but I can't find a (relatively) easy way to figure out what they are and install them.

You're going to have to tell us what distribution you're using, because they all do package management slightly differently.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

jstultz posted:

Really quick question (hopefully). I'm used to using RHEL, but just (as in like 30 minutes ago) switched to Ubuntu (7.04, 64-bit), and I'm not familiar with Ubuntu/Debian/apt. I'm trying to get my system up and running on NIS, but can't seem to get the necessary packages installed. As far as I can tell, I need portmap and nis, so:

First, use "aptitude" instead of apt-get. It's better, mainly in that it tracks things which you chose to install vs. things that were only installed because of dependencies, so if you remove a package it can automatically clean out unused libraries. (And it mostly has the same syntax, and you can mix and match - run apt-get one time, then aptitude the next time - with no ill effects, so don't worry if you forget once. All the web pages and docs will say "apt-get", but that's just tradition.)

Second, do "aptitude update" to be sure your sources list is up to date, then try again. If that doesn't work, post the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Big Big Moon posted:

After my Macbook crisis I installed Linux Mint as an interim OS. Everything is updated and working fine but I have a few questions about some things I noticed during the partition/install process:

1. What does it mean to mount a filesystem?

You know on a Mac when you put in a CD, or plug in an external hard drive or a USB key or something, and a new icon shows up on your desktop? That's "mounting" the filesystem that's on the CD/hard drive/USB key. When you get a .dmg file, and you double-click it and it creates a new "virtual hard disk" icon, that's mounting the filesystem that's contained inside the .dmg file. When you have the .dmg file just sitting there but you haven't double-clicked it, or the CD isn't actually in the drive or whatever, the filesystem still exists, but you can't get at it because it's not mounted.

It's actually possible to stick a CD in but not mount the filesystem until you tell it to, in which case it just sits there waiting for commands, but Mac OS (and on Linux, Gnome and KDE and other high-level environments) generally hide this from you by automatically mounting file systems on new devices as soon as they notice them.

The "root" filesystem is the main one that the OS is installed on. You can't unmount a filesystem when files on it are in use, or they'd disappear out from under the program that's using them and things would go haywire. So you can never unmount the root filesystem because the OS is installed there and it's guaranteed to be using at least a couple of files.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here: if the OS is in charge of mounting and unmounting filesystems, and it lives on the root filesystem, how does the root filesystem ever get mounted? That's the boot loader's job - it pokes into the filesystem at a very low level, finds the OS "kernel", loads it into memory and starts it running. From there, the OS kernel actually mounts the root filesystem and then starts up all the other resources that make the complete OS. LILO and GRUB are both boot loaders, and the difference is just that they use different techniques to do this and so the steps needed to set them up are different. Some people prefer one, some prefer the other.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

PsychoCowboy posted:

I'm trying to resize a ext3 partition on an external usb disk with gparted, the task has been running for about 3 hours now. The disk is still clicking away every now and then.

Should it be taking this long? After I started the process I came across some information that suggested that I should first disable the ext3 journaling before trying to resize.



When I did it with an 80 gig drive with NTFS/vfat partitions on it last weekend, it only took a couple of minute. Maybe ext3's just slower, but I doubt it.

EDIT: then again, my system was almost empty. It's possible it's having to move a lot of stuff around to fit it in the smaller size, although ext3's supposed to be self-defragmenting.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

dfn_doe posted:

I'm not sure what you've said even makes any sense or addresses any of what i posted. By "dependency hell" I was referring to the trend in most modern distros to target everything to build against the maximum number of build time options. Which results is in common ridiculousness like requiring a full set of X11 libs in order to build vim, and the X11 requires true type, which requires pango, which requires blah blah blah.

The common meaning of "dependency hell" is when dependencies are completely broken, not that there's too many of them. For instance, the new version of package X adds a new dependency on Y, which has a dependency on Z, which conflicts with X so it's not possible to install them both at the same time (using the standard package manaer). Or X has a dependency on version 1 of Z, and Y has a dependency on version 2, so you can't install them both on the same system because there's no facility for installing multiple versions of Z. You'll always find a little bit of this, but "dependency hell" is when it becomes epidemic.

quote:

And this is just plain stupid. Why on earth would you run anything called "unstable" and expect anything less than exactly that!??! A vanilla gentoo build is one of the most stable and easy to manage systems available. And the aforementioned lack of unneeded dependencies is one of the reasons why.

It's probably people who come from Debian, who are used to running the "unstable" build because there are rarely serious problems with it and the stable build is very slow to update.

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

deimos posted:

Unstable is not the testing branch, but some developers thought it was a good idea to publish directly to the unstable branch and break everything for a lot of people.

Hmm, going only by this comment, it sounds to me like Gentoo and Debian use opposite meanings for their unstable and testing branches. Debian uses "unstable" for the day to day, good enough for a desktop branch, "testing" for the temporary branch that they're testing the hell out of before declaring it stable, and "stable" for the branch that's good enough for critical servers. Stuff that's brand new and barely tested at all goes to "experimental".

Sounds like Gentoo "unstable" is Debian "experimental", and Gentoo "testing" is Debian "unstable".

JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

dfn_doe posted:

Well, that may be, but I'm trying argue semantics. The problem/situation I've described does exist and is contrary to the ultimate goals that were listed.

I'm just saying if this ever comes up again you need to pick a different term, or explain yourself in full like you just did, because if you just say, "dependency hell" without explanation people will assume you're talking about something different.

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JoeNotCharles
Mar 3, 2005

Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Harokey posted:

There's an update manager that allows you to update to the new version.

Pretty much is just updates your sources to the new "Gutsy" sources and you do an apt-get dist-upgrade and it works. You don't even need to bring your system offline to do it (Like you're supposed to do for Fedora...)

Just to be clear, you *could* update your sources to "Gutsy" and do "dist-upgrade" yourself, but they always say, "Don't do that because it might gently caress things up! Use the upgrade-manager instead!" I've seen people post questions about why such-and-such stopped working after an upgrade they did by hand, and the official response was, "You're supposed to use the upgrade manager. Not our fault you're screwed now."

So it does more than just change the sources for you, apparently. I always forget it exists until I've already fiddled with the sources, myself - old habits.

Speaking of old habits, use "aptitude dist-upgrade" instead of "apt-get" - it's a newer wrapper that keeps track of more stuff for you. Whenever you see "apt-get such-and-such", you can just use "aptitude" instead. It's nice that Debian keeps all the old methods mostly working when they come out with new methods, but it makes it kind of bewildering when you find docs from three different time periods with three different methods of doing things.

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