IMHO you stepped over the line from justified complaint into ridiculous ranting with that statement. Man pages are known to work everywhere for every unix application, are extremely good, are trivial to use, etc. Objecting to manpages is losing the plot.
I haven’t compiled anything on linux other than kernels for the last 3 years. And only about twice in the preceding 3 years (both times to do with certain non-mass-market hardware, like big graphics tablets).
I do not compile under linux. I hate it. I hate C (I never ever want to be paid to program C again - far too painful - I certainly don’t want to be fixing other people’s C source) which gives me irrational desires to avoid all C++ compilation too.
Sorry, I meant the same fundamental problems exist, and are solved in different ways. Things like .deb and aptitude solve a lot of the problems you’re citing, and I could dig out windows users who have similar problems or complaints with Windows’s solutions for the same fundamental problems - I was pointing out that although “installing software” may not have obvious problems, other parts of the same problem space (solved or not) do have obvious problems on windows.
This is, in fact, my experience. Except I dont click, I use an ANSI interactive menu system - and dont notice that I’m losing anything over a mouse GUI.
Webstart fixes that ;). Explicitly (by design)!
Not really. The more that people rant about the **** that try to stop people using java on debian, the better, IMHO :).
Sorry, the “hidden feature” I refer to is apt-get itself, not man pages. As far as command-line tools go (and no end-user should be required to use the command line these days… that’s just dumb), man pages are fairly reasonable… for a system administrator… in the 70’s :). (Which I guess is the role I was playing.) Of course they only work once you’ve found the command you need the docs for.
[moving to an even higher rant level]
Maybe I should have tried to access the box with a teletype terminal, if that’s the expected user interface for interacting with Linux these days. Ridiculous ranting? Hardly. I call it it simple observation. “man pages” do contain the needed info, but you have go back in time 25 years or so to qualify them as “extremely good” - there’s no diagrams, no hyper-links, no decent search facility, no colour (apart from ‘bold’ - oooooh), no interactivity. They are designed to be reminders for people that already are unix geeks. They are designed for computer scientists, not the users of today (or the last 20 years).
[…rant level back to normal]
The point being that the user experience is presented as a point-and-click modern UI, but it’s really just faking it. I’m forced to use the 70’s technology of a unix command shell and man pages to do something as fundamental as install a program. Not to mention that I had to find out about apt-get by luck in the first place before I could even conjure up the man page.
You had to compile the kernel to install a device driver! What a joke. It’s Pathetic. Absurd. I had thought that the Linux folks solved that problem by now.
And to think I’ve heard Linux folks laugh at how Windows needs to restart after installing various bits of software… Rebuilding the OS from source is an improvement?
[quote]I do not compile under linux. I hate it. I hate C (I never ever want to be paid to program C again - far too painful - I certainly don’t want to be fixing other people’s C source) which gives me irrational desires to avoid all C++ compilation too.
[/quote]
As I mentioned, not only was this required to install Subversion, source code is actually the only form in which it is distributed by the developers. Yes, others in the community eventually solve the problem by doing the rest of the work of compiling the app and making platform-specific installers… but there is still no Windows installer for the latest version of Subversion after a few weeks, and so far I’ve only seen one Linux package that was made available recently.
A few years ago when attempting to get Samba to work… the “experts” all told me to go get the source and build it myself… which was next to impossible due to dependency issues… and didn’t help anyway. Of course that time Windows was likely half the problem.
I’m not just whining randomly… this (or something equally irritating) has come up every time I’ve given a new Linux distro a try, for the past several years.
[quote][quote]
In an ideal world .deb packages would be the only thing provided for Linux software installs. You would download them, from anywhere, because they would all work with all versions of Linux - at least for the same processor architecture, you would double click it and that would be all there is to it. We are still a long way from that.
[/quote]
This is, in fact, my experience. Except I dont click, I use an ANSI interactive menu system - and dont notice that I’m losing anything over a mouse GUI.
[/quote]
If you are using an ANSI interactive menu system chances are you have already gone to a command prompt, so for a typical user you are already well beyond their comfort zone.
But as I stated earlier… this option was not presented to me when I wanted to install various packages on Ubuntu. The “advertised” UI for installing software that I found in the equivalent of the windows “Start” menu did not offer the packages I needed. The goose chase began…
If apt-get is the way it is supposed to be done, then doesn’t it make sense for it to be placed in plain sight like the other package manager was?
Keep in mind that I did find apt-get, I did manage to get Subversion built… but I was irritated the whole time. The process was not just different from the typical Windows or Mac experience, it was archaic by comparison. That I find myself in that situation repeatedly, that it appears to be the accepted norm, should be an embarrassment for the Linux community, but they seem to thrive on the fact that they can show off their nerdy l33t skillz and compile things from scratch or pop into a bash shell to fetch a few missing packages instead of providing a reasonable user-experience.
Many of the users here make sure their code runs on Linux. How many make Debian packages for their games? Something like a simple, double-clickable installer that will go fetch the sun-java package to install Java if it isn’t already installed and install the game complete with desktop and “start” menu shortcuts? How many of the people here even know how to do that?
Thankfully they don’t need to for Java apps because we have Web Start… but hopefully my point still gets through…
In general there doesn’t seem to be a Linux equivalent of “setup.exe” that works as well and is actually used consistently. Linux generally doesn’t seem to have anything that simple and it appears to be decades away from the simple drag and drop install of OS X. (If that ever catches on outside of the Mac environment at all.)
Sigh… sorry… I’ve gone and ranted again… and I kept telling myself I wouldn’t…
I gather then that .deb packages are distribution agnostic? You just need to match the architecture? That would certainly help.
[quote]What is synaptic?
[/quote]
It’s just another ‘top secret’ feature. First you said that there was no GUI for installing software (1½ page ago or so). I pointed out that:
[quote]Swpalmer, press System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.
[/quote]
This post must evidently have gone unnoticed, which is fine. But I cannot understand how you keep complaining about the lack of GUIs and the ‘secret’ apt-get and aptitude things when the package manager GUI is right there in the menu! If you press Applications -> Add Applications you get an even simpler interface, but synaptic can be launched by entering ‘advanced’ mode. You can add more software repositories there, for example.
It’s just another ‘top secret’ feature. First you said that there was no GUI for installing software (1½ page ago or so). I pointed out that:
[quote]Swpalmer, press System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.
[/quote]
This post must evidently have gone unnoticed, which is fine.
[/quote]
Yes it did, sorry.
I can’t find where I ever said Linux has no GUI for installing software… I complained about the GUI that I did find though
[quote] But I cannot understand how you keep complaining about the lack of GUIs and the ‘secret’ apt-get and aptitude things when the package manager GUI is right there in the menu! If you press Applications -> Add Applications you get an even simpler interface, but synaptic can be launched by entering ‘advanced’ mode. You can add more software repositories there, for example.
[/quote]
When I reboot into Ubuntu I will check again. Perhaps I just was confused because I didn’t think I wanted to manage “synaptic packages”, or maybe I just missed it plain and simple… or maybe for some reason it isn’t there… I don’t know until I reboot.
But don’t lose sight of my point that on Windows or Mac none of this knowledge is needed to install software. It is a much more direct and simple process. Download, double click… next, next, next. Or on Mac, download, double click, drag, drop.
No finding the right tool… no scanning lists of packages… no being several versions behind because the latest version hasn’t been blessed into an installable package. As a developer I can make an installer for windows or a disk image for Mac and that’s it… my software is now available to everyone running Windows or Mac.
There are some advantages of the blessed packages though… there is probably some additional protection from malicious software. In theory there is less chance of something getting hosed.
I should appologise for my ranting… It’s just that I’ve always found the “Linux experience” to be a very frustrating one… I have a degree in Computer Engineering… Heck! I’ve written a real-time, premptive, multitasking kernel in hand-coded assembler… installing software should be easy
As it is, I install a new version of Linux every 18 months or so to see if it is usable yet… I use it for several weeks and then conclude that it is not. Whereas, a few years ago when I got my powerbook, I had not used Mac OS since 1984, and yet I instantly fell in love with it. Or go back a few more years to 1995, when I graduated and got a job programming on Windows NT… Windows sucked compared to the Amiga system I had used previously, but installing software was never a problem and I could generally cope with it even though I hated it. Since then I’ve tried Linux off and on and other than a couple occassions (where I was amazed that the installer did the right thing, or that the distribution supported the old hardware I had better than Windows), it has generally disappointed me the most. Stuck in there in the late 90’s was some brief fiddling with BeOS, it was a delight. Better than Windows without doubt, something that could have given the Mac some good competition… If BeOS was a viable choice I probably wouldn’t have got a Mac.
So I will give an OS a chance… I’m not stuck on my favourite (Mac OS X) and unwilling to learn something new. I’m not anti-unix. Both Mac OS X and BeOS (my two most recent favourites) are unix-based. But they did some critical things to make unix more user-friendly and Linux has not. Linux tried to clone the Windows 95 UI on the desktop… but it leaves out the bits that made it slightly usable.
Of all the people I know, I’m actually the most “Linux tolerant” :)… whenever I boot into Linux at work it only takes a few minutes before someone laughs. And asks “why?”
FWIW, swpalmer is not alone. In the past several years I have had a hate-hate relationship with Linux. It is much better now than it was in, say, 1997. Ubuntu installed for me without a hitch. I didn’t have to manually configure the X Server or anything. But it still is not a user-friendly OS. People who have taken the time to learn their way around Linux (or who have been taught) will surely be comfortable writing sed scripts, compiling kernels, and doing all of those crazy things Linux types do. But for someone like me (and apparently swpalmer) who wants to boot into an OS and not worry about all of the little headaches, Linux just doesn’t cut it.
It’s too much work to get graphics card drivers to function, there are too many dependencies, most distros install a bunch of garbage I don’t want but that a zillion utilities I don’t use depend on, programs scatter files all over the place (the home directory I can live with, but having libraries over there, log files over here, documentation out that way - it’s friggin ridiculous), if you want to uninstall something that didn’t come in a deb package or rpm you’re going to be searching all over for stuff it installs (of course, grep can make that easier but it’s just one more tool to learn)… What I’m getting at is that it just takes more work to use Linux than I’m willing to put into it. I don’t have the time to invest to get comfortable with everything I need to know. Every time I try a new version I spend more time trying to make things work than getting any work done. It’s wholly unproductive. Windows is hands down easier to use out of the box, and that means more productivity to me.
I do have Ubuntu running on my LAN, as a SVN, ftp, mysql and Apache server. I decided not to install any form of XWindows at all and actually cut out as much of the default crap as I could. I only hit the KVM switch to log into it when I need to update my packages with apt-get. Other than that, I do very little with it, though I have gradually learned my way around it a bit more. For me, that’s all I need it to be. When they make a Linux distro that is as easy to use as Windows and doesn’t require you to pore through man pages and howtos to get anything done, then it will be something I’d be interested in using more.
I followed those instructions and they mostly worked.
I choose to install Java 5 update 6 JDK…
After following those instructions ‘java’ and ‘javac’ are the 1.5.0_06 versions, but running ‘javaws’ still gives the Java 1.5.0_05 version from the JRE that was previously installed.
On Windows the JDK download will also install a public JRE, not just the JRE that is inside the JDK folder.
I also attempted to follow those instructions to install Java 6 b80… but they do not work for that. (Java 6 installs cleanly on Windows without any hacking around.)
Java performance, mainly graphics (e.g. Turtle Combat) seems low compared to Windows on the same machine and a slower Mac, but I need to take measurements.
Hmm. it seems Ubuntu may have installed a single-processor kernel on my multi-processor PC.
Only a single processor shows up under “Device Manager” and even it is not identified. (Vendor and Device “unknown”!)
But it says the PC has two power buttons (it has only one that I’m aware of.)
Actually I search the Ubuntu site and found instructions that said to use Synaptic to search for ‘linux-image’ and install the SMP kernel packages… (which of course the Ubuntu installer should have done automatically)
So I did…
And the SMP kernel fails with a null pointer dereference during boot time.
It was not the same kernel version that is shown in that URL though… I’m using “Breezy” not “Dapper”. Perhaps a more major upgrade will fix things.
Not an acceptable user experience nonetheless. Even if it did work… asking an end-user to manually select a kernel image is fairly ridiculous. It’s alright for techies like you and I, but most users don’t even know what a kernel is, and they should need to be aware that it even exists.
I agree, but : do you see any way to avoid that ? heh, you could detect SMP at installation and then loads the correct kernel, that’d be a way. The great thing with ubuntu is, just post that onto their forums, and you’re sure to see that for Dapper, or for Dapper+1.
Changin your kernel is something drastic, an user is unlikely to update his kernel if he is fitting his needs (there are still a lot of people working on 2.4 kernels) ie, modules, hw support, etc… but anyway, apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade and at last apt-get dist-upgrade should update the kernel image IF your distro’s maintainter estimate that a newer kernel will fit better.
Either you are the less lucky one on earth with a linux install (which i thought it was myself) or you are screwing your linux in a lot of strange ways ;D .
Very useful command under any unix is “which”. “which javaws” will tell you what is actually being called when you type javaws. (Likely itsb a symlink, doing an ls -l on that will show you where the symlink is pointing to.)
If this is 3D make sure your 3D acceleration is enabled. easiest way to do this is to run the “glgears” demo. If you see framerates in the thousands then youve got acceleration, If you say frame rates in the hundreds then you dont.
That I cant help you with. Google it with the phrase “HowTo” as one of the match terms. Thats the bets way to find instructions to do anything under Linux.
Thanks Jeff, but I know ‘which’ – in fact if you look only a few posts up you will see that I used “which” to follow the links and show how installing the JDK was somewhat “incomplete” by leaving the javaws command linked to the old JRE.
So I upgraded to the Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.06) beta… I figured it isn’t work well anyway, so how could a beta be worse
After the upgrade, which went fairly smooth, the X Server was completely broken. Thankfully I remembered blah^3 siad that aptitude was a text mode package manager so I fired it up to see if there was some nvidia stuff I could install.
Aptitude has a pretty brutal interface… but I managed to suffer through it enough to find some sort of nvidia-glx package, install it, find the magic command “sudo nvidia-glx-config enable” after which I manually started the X Server and it ran! So I decided to reboot to see if the GUI would come up clean.
But first I decided to install the SMP kernel…
The SMP kernel in dapper still failed in exactly the same way as the breezy version.
Conclusion: Ubuntu ships a broken SMP kernel and has for the past 6 months. I have yet to search to see if this is a known issue or there is a known workaround.
So I reboot with the non-SMP kernel and it does cleanly boot to the GUI login screen… so here I am.
The UI in general seems a little faster.
The graphics in Java (Turtle Combat again) are notably faster.
If it weren’t for the broken X Server after upgrading and the fact that I can’t run the correct kernel so half of my CPU power goes unused, and I have to manually configure and install Java to get a recent and working JRE/JDK, it would almost be usable.
silly question: are you installing the proper kernel image package? it happened to me that i was installing the 2.6.16-k7-1 package and i didn’t get it to boot until i installed 2.6.16-k7 dummy package, wich has some important dependeces. No distro ships broken packages on the stable branch, so obviously you are doing it wrong.
Going for dapper is a BAD idea if you want it the easy way. Make your mind to fix a lot of things each time you run an upgrade, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t use the testing distros.
I have recently installed suse, and my biggest problem was the nv drivers. YaST doesn’t have the latest and greatest and my card needs the latest and greatest to run…
Going back to the java problem, adding the proper mirror to the update, then opening yast and typing “java” gave me 1.5, click that, and away you go…
Oh, that was a good one. That’s like saying there are no bugs in Windows.
I am installing the exact same package that I already had except in this case I pick the one with -SMP tacked on the end.
And of course it’s not me that should be doing “it” in the first place. Ubuntu installed the wrong kernel on my multi-processor system… Hmm… maybe it knows the SMP kernel doesn’t work :).
I’m using Ubuntu 5.10 with the SMP kernel at work and it seems to work fine. Ubuntu was the only distro I could get working cause I’m about as far from a Linux guru as anyone could be.
For those interested in getting Sun’s VM on Ubuntu, there’s a howto for Java if you go to Help–>Beginner’s guide–>Applications–>Java. There’s some fiddling involved before you can grab non-GPL packages so it won’t be quite as simple as Windows’ neat wizards, but I guess that’s fair considering Ubuntu’s UI budget compared to Microsoft’s.
- I certainly don’t want to be fixing other people’s C source) which gives me irrational desires to avoid all C++ compilation too.
;). Explicitly (by design)!
:’(