Singing Potatoes
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next
Tuesday, 6 December 2005
System hosed. System repaired.
Stupid plastic piece of crap!

Today I tried upgrading my Linux desktop environment, as I noticed that a brand-new version was out. Long story short, I have the stable version of Debian Linux, and KDE 3.5 apparently depends on some libraries only available in the unstable version1, so things didn't work out too well2. It took me about an hour to rip KDE out by the roots and replace the original version.

But on the positive side, I did the entire thing — upgrade, removal and reinstallation — without rebooting,3 and once I got the original version of KDE reinstalled, my desktop was exactly the way I'd left it. The more I use Linux, the more I like it.4 If only my three favorite Windows apps had Linux versions...

1. Which would have been nice to know before I tried it.

2. Which is to say, it entirely uninstalled KDE and all applications associated with it, installed a few of its new libraries and then barfed because some of them had files already contained in other packages, and once I'd forced it to overwrite the duplicate files (nothing important, just icons and images), then it finally realized it didn't have the right library versions and refused to install any further. And it wouldn't install the original version back again, because the bits which had been installed had higher version numbers. So I had to go find those bits and remove them before I could go back to what I had.

3. Which is fortunate, because I've been too lazy to put my network drive mappings into /etc/fstab, so it would have been a pain to try to remember what they all were. I'll probably get around to doing that now. Probably.

4. Despite problems like this, which, to be fair, would have been avoided had I just waited for the new version of KDE to show up when I did an update in apt-get or kpackage.


Posted by godfrey (link)
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next
Comments
Since when are you a Linux-hed???

During my brief flirtation with PPC GNU/Linux on my old iMac, I used Debian, but to be honest I found the package system too limiting for exactly the same reasons that you didn't want to wait for KDE. On the other hand, if I had installed Sid instead of Woody, presumably I would have gotten the latest and greatest releases permanently.

Lately, I find myself just compiling any UNIX apps I need from scratch, rather than using any OS X package management software.

And of course, most of my stuff with Linux is on my iPod now... :)
Posted by Squelch on 15 Dec 2005 17:25
Are you saying iPods run Linux?! Curse you! I had no desire to own an iPod! Must... resist... temptation!

Well, I've tried Linux (and other Unix variants) off and on — I tried FreeBSD somewhere around 1992 or 1993, found it frustrating to even get installed. Tried again with Mandriva in 2002, back when it was still called Mandrake. Wasn't really willing to commit to it — I was dual-booting between Windows and Linux, and because the boot-up time was so painful, I tended to avoid rebooting to the point I never actually used Mandrake — but I was interested in getting a Lindows notebook in 2003. Sadly, my money kept finding other things to be spent on, so I never did.

Then in June 2005, I gave Knoppix a try, since it was a live-on-CD distro and didn't require repartitioning my hard drive. I was quite impressed. Was going to install it dual-boot on my game server, which I rarely used, but there wasn't enough disk space. So I installed a new hard drive and made the whole thing Debian, upon which Knoppix is based. (When I blogged briefly about it, a similar comment was made about the Debian package-management system.)

Around the same time, I commandeered a workstation for my office (we have hundreds of spares sitting in our depot) and put Debian on it; I use that machine for doing everything work-related except email and compiling Windows executables. About 95% of my workday is spent with the KVM switch pointing to the Linux box.

Anyway, yeah, I love Linux. I'd dump Windows altogether, except for a handful of apps I use that just don't have Linux equivalents on a true par (Finale, SONAR, Animation:Master). And then of course there's the whole world of gaming. I don't do it much normally, but I'd hate to show up at a LAN party with nothing but a Linux box.

Posted by Godfrey on 16 Dec 2005 10:31