Boredom, Dapper Tweaking

[techieMoe]

When I get bored, things in my house get tinkered with. I ordered 3 Ubuntu Dapper CDs (AMD64, i386, and PPC) and one Kubuntu (AMD64) from ShipIt and after my initial review they've been sitting on my desk gathering dust. Last night I decided on a whim to install the 32-bit Dapper and try to use my Debian Sarge DVD as a repository to pull off some packages I needed (alien and libgtk1.2 for instance). Much to my surprise, it worked. Had I left it alone at that I might have been fine.

I have never been one to stop tinkering once I start, so while I was busy looking through the Sarge DVD for other things to install, I noticed that the Ubuntu update agent was telling me there were updates available. "Hmm!" I said to myself, "I wonder what would happen if I updated from the Sarge DVD?" So I let the updater update whatever it thought it needed and continued on.

Long story short, this isn't a good idea. I ended up hosing my Ubuntu install, but since I didn't really plan on using the thing anyway it was a fun learning experience. Since my current install was borked, I decided (again just for kicks) to install and thoroughly explore the 64-bit version of Kubuntu Dapper. After the install I found that (not surprisingly) a lot more polish went into Ubuntu than Kubuntu, most notably in the package managers. In regular Ubuntu, you get their version of Synaptic which is pretty newbie-oriented (doesn't let you configure your sources very easily, doesn't show all available packages) and you also get regular Synaptic which you can use to browse the regular Debian repositories, or in my case the Sarge DVD.

In Kubuntu you get the newbie-friendly package manager but not full-blown Synaptic. This causes issues if you want to add new repositories (you can't). Undaunted I decided perhaps I could install the regular Ubuntu desktop using my Ubuntu CD. I tried every permutation of apt-get install I could think of and none of them wanted to work. Long story short here: don't install Kubuntu, even if you like KDE. It's a shamefully incomplete derivative. A blue-headed stepchild if you will. You can always install regular Ubuntu and then add KDE later and you'll still have a working version of Synaptic.

Again, why am I posting this? Who knows. Perhaps someone can profit from my experiences in tinkering. If not, perhaps the rest of you can chuckle at my self-inflicted misfortune.

[petergriffin]

Long story short here: don't install Kubuntu, even if you like KDE. It's a shamefully incomplete derivative. A blue-headed stepchild if you will. You can always install regular Ubuntu and then add KDE later and you'll still have a working version of Synaptic.

Again, why am I posting this? Who knows. Perhaps someone can profit from my experiences in tinkering. If not, perhaps the rest of you can chuckle at my self-inflicted misfortune.

Too late.... I already did the other day, but it's getting wiped soon as I'm bored of it already

Thanks for the advice about installing Ubuntu and adding KDE though.

[carlosponti]

i was playing with slapt-get trying to get keno, video editing software, to run. i had alot of packages it needed updates to well to make a long story short i updated some and it broke firefox and various other programs. so i had to go back from Current to 10.2 repos. still havent got Keno working.

[ImNeat]

Again, why am I posting this? Who knows. Perhaps someone can profit from my experiences in tinkering.

I suggested Kubuntu to a friend of mine who wants to give linux a whirl. Doh. I'll tell him to get Ubuntu and install KDE - which imho will be nice because he'll have gnome & kde to compare side by side.

[bigtomrodney]

Even the Kubuntu splash looks like a badly gimped Ubuntu one. But I read a while back that Canonical are working tightly with KDE developers to improve Kubuntu. It really is Gnome-centric with a KDE frontend hacked on imho.

That said I' sure if they do the work they're saying they will they will benefit greatly with KDE4.0. I'm quite looking forward to that myself too.

[jnev]

I've been using kubuntu for the past week and it's working fine for me... not sure what everybody's problems with it are. if you don't like adept just install synaptic.

[techieMoe]

I've been using kubuntu for the past week and it's working fine for me... not sure what everybody's problems with it are. if you don't like adept just install synaptic.

I can't speak for this unnamed "everybody" but my problems center around the fact that I have no internet connection, therefore I can't "just install synaptic". Besides, I didn't post this thread to blast Kubuntu.

[daacosta]

Ubuntu 6.06 looks too windowzy for my taste... Not having Internet access on my desktop sucks! I can't do anything with my box [Need to install a firewall and some other toys that I absolutely need...] The OS however, seems to feel at home and it is working fine... I need to solve the Internet problem fast!