Reality Check

[Mel Thompson]

I had cleared my hard drive in order to install Xubuntu. Er, em, ahem. Well, anyway, God bless them. So after I was done with that, I had to return to the planet Earth, the place where we all were said, at last report, to actually live.

So it was time to do a clean-install of the latest Debian, which is, by the way, especially the DVD full version, an amazingly stable and complete package. Except of course it does not come with Flash pre-installed, nor Real Player, nor Scibus. My first thing, after having gone many months without going back into command-line world, (except for the course I'm taking), was to get back on that old terminal and and re-learn the "su" command, which is the real way to get to some root privileges, (and it is very necessary given the high-value target that my computer is, what with, you know, me having no money and no assets and all, to make sure all this stuff gets done in a very secure environment). Then I downloaded my tarball, (a sad thing too, because insteaf of a tarball, I had hoped to be able to download a thing called "a software program," but alas, we get tarballs). And, by good fortune, I had an extractor which allowed me to go around the xvfz chmod a+x circus and simply have the folder on my desktop. Miraculously my sudo program then worked, and that's really cool, given the massive effort put in to making sure that program works for as few people as possible. And then, even more stunning, the old ./ command worked. And that command hadn't worked since my wife left me for having no life.

In any case, I have a Philosophy degree, and I think everything to utter ruin, and even I think that's still too much information to have to know just to get Flash to work.

Mel C. Thompson, The Eternal Newbie.

P.S. - - Installers, Sound - - look into it. It's going to be tragic if some of us older guys have to start saying, "I'm hoping to see a universal graphic installer for Linux programs 'in my lifetime.'"

[Mel Thompson]

How a newbie gets Real Player 11 onto his Deiban/Ubuntu system. Well, of course, he doesn't, and then goes mac to his Mac. But, I can't fully live in that real world, so I had to carry on.

It was not so bad, really. For instance, I had to have major surgery to prevent an infection from spreading to my brain and killing me, and for sure installing Real Player on Debian was not exactly that bad, although the fact that such thoughts come up during . . . well, anyway.

So I went to the Real Player sight and downloaded my .bin file. That really bummed me out because in other OS platforms we downloaded things called computer software programs, which, I guess, on Linux would be regarded as simply just giving away the store, or something.

Now my .bin file sat there like a hostile opponent, impervious to the ./ command given to newbies. But fortunately, I was just masochistic enough to go on a massive Google search for the solution. This involved actually learning from experience which explanations are so contorted that they either cannot work, or are too insane for any rational person to be attracted to.

Amazingly, I found that this time the chmod a+x thing worked immediately, and hence the ./ command also worked. But sadly, mid-install, the installer routine in my terminal window stops, saying it will not go further until an exact path is given for the install. In the old world, installers had a weird duty where they themselves installed themselves in the relevant directories, but apparently, for some moral reason, this needs to be our task, and it needs to happen mid-install.

Hence, I went back onto Google in another window and found that I needed to open up another terminal, so as not to crash my current install effort. From there I had to create the /opt/RealPlayer directory, since apparently it doesn't really cooperate with any other directory, (and I was tempted to send it to a few of them). So from the other terminal I created that directory, but was then told that, had I been so foolish as to hit that return button to continue my install, I would have again been blocked, since that folder would then be hostile to non-owners. Thus did I drag out the old chown sword and assure the installer that it indeed was installing to a safe haven.

That being done, I did the instructed "F" and return, and, astoundingly, the Real Player not only installed, but actually had an icon on my program bar, (a little thing that most distros just can't force themselves to do, for fear that computer reprobates could fall into the sinful habit of laziness).

And thus, after another epic journey, did I manage to conquer the world, (if conquering the world could be equated to merely installing a plugin that takes two minutes to upgrade in the real world.)

I remain, Mel C. Thompson, The Eternal Newbie, aka FREE NON-FREE ALL ALL.

[kveldulf980]

There's no way to get RP via apt? That seems silly. Even on the mp3-dry Fedora I can get everything I need with yum (thanks livna). It's been a while, with the exception of my old slack box, since I've had to worry about tarballs or bin installs for major software, there's usually a repo around for it somewhere.

[bigtomrodney]

I have to stop you there Mel. You've gone out of your way to pick a distribution aimed at people who like to do everything themselves and who don't like using non-free software.

It seems like a waste of your time and ours to complain about that. There are plenty of distributions aimed at keeping you free of the command line if you so wish. And this week of all weeks with the release of Ubuntu 8.04 - A Debian based distro that has less need for command line now than ever before if that's what you wish for. That coupled with the availability of huge amounts of free and non-free software directly through the repositories. You'll find a similar situation with many other desktop oriented distributions.

Not all distros are the same, and for good reason. If they were it would just be work duplication. Instead they all specialise. Debian is like a Lego or Meccano kit ready to be whatever you want it to be, but with that flexibility it requires work from you.