Comments on: Ubuntu Aptitude Giving Me Attitude

By: RyanB

RyanB — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:35:49 +0000

I’m generally a fan of apt-get for package installation. I am, however, strongly biased toward Debian-based distros mainly because of aptitude and such large and well-maintained repositories. After doing some rather stupid things that generally broke my Debian Etch desktop, aptitude saved the day. Some good time with aptitude fixed all the broken packages and left me in a better state than before since it cleaned up a mess left over from a proprietary NVIDIA driver, leaving a clean slate for a fresh NVIDIA driver install.

I started my journey with RHEL 5. I wiped my system in favor of Debian as I found yum to be slow and aggravating. I always found myself searching and resolving dependencies based on yum failures. Many times these dependencies were not in RHEL’s repos, so I had to start adding other repos….so once I started adding repositories from other sources it took packages backward in time and broke my system. Recovering from that was not as graceful as aptitude; in fact, it was not graceful at all. My system was so broken I couldn’t even remove packages. At the time I wiped RHEL, I had 200 + updates that were unable to install. With RHEL, it’s their way or not at all, I gathered.

I’m sorry if my bad experience with RHEL inflames some of the rpm-based distro lovers, but so far my experience is rpm=closed, rpm=rigid, rpm=unreliable. I disliked SuSE for the same reason (although SuSE repositories are better than RHEL). I have not yet tried Fedora, and perhaps FC offers more packages and better compatibility with 3rd party repositories.

Some of the problems listed above with Ubuntu hardware support and DVD playback don’t ring true with me. I set up a Sony Vaio recently with Xubuntu. It detected and installed drivers for the wireless, touch pad, hibernate and video without issue. On my Debian boxes and the Ubuntu box I have deployed elsewhere, DVD playback has been great with Xine and Mplayer. The only time it’s “sketchy” is when the DVD is scratched. Then it’s not an issue with the operating system. Totem has given me trouble before.

By: AmyRose

AmyRose — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:39:35 +0000

This is because aptitude installs recommended packages by default. Just type “sudo aptitude” without any further parameters and go to the dependency settings window and turn off the installation of recommended packages. Or, if you’re using Hardy’s aptitude, it will be under the settings window somewhere.

Hope this helps.

By: Daniel Lackey

Daniel Lackey — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:56:41 +0000

I’m back to XP after some Ubuntu issues (mainly the fact that 1) DVD playback was always sketchy, 2) my sound levels and quality were wonky, which for a mediaphile isn’t good and 3) I couldn’t play my games properly), but I agree with you 100%. Ubuntu is the way to go. As is command line installs. It makes me always feel, for lack of a better word, capable.

sudo apt-get install beer always yields humorous results on differing campus computers here. We tried to name one of our IM teams “sudo apt-get goal” but most of the team didn’t get it, which was a shame because I had a killer logo for our jerseys

By: Lloyd

Lloyd — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:33:58 +0000

Thanks for the comment Keith. I really enjoy Ubuntu and GNOME actually. For all its faults I’ve never used a finer linux.

By: Keith Bowes

Keith Bowes — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:09:40 +0000

From my experience, Ubuntu is a PITA period. I just upgraded to 7.10, hoping it would be decent after my hatred of 7.04, but it seems to be even worse. Yep, next upgrade, it’s back to the RPM-based distros.

That said, I’m a geek too. I always use the command-line, for that sort of thing. Perhaps for more reason than anything because I just use a simple window manager and stay away from GNOME.

By: lid

lid — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:32:32 +0000

I always stay old-school so I stick with apt-get install.