Nerd wannabe

(what, no links in this post? but you know what i’m talking about..)

I am currently running Ubuntu, and some months ago used to run ArchLinux. Some year ago I used to manually install everything in slackware, without package dependencies (swaret executed an ldd on the new binaries and searched another package to provide them;)

I quit slackware when, exasperated of building gnome with jhbuild, I tainted it with dropline and no way back was known but fresh install. It was the most developer-friendly distro I had: want to test some new library/compiler or anything? svn co && ./configure && make install and you had it. Same with all bleeding-edge packages.

Next, ArchLinux was a breeze: you did ‘pacman gnome’ (or something) and it listed you everything that will be installed (belonging to the group ‘gnome’). Installing bleeding-edge software in Arch was a 3-choices thing: you either already found the latest version in the testing repository, or you found a PKGBUILD script in the Archlinux User Repository (based on which you built your own package, maybe a new version if you wanted) or, in the worst case, you needed to write the PKGBUILD yourself.

The PKGBUILD was like a 5-liner with package name, version, dependencies and a build () function that did.. svn co && ./configure && make install.

Then there’s Ubuntu, where you can find Anjuta (for example) in Add/Remove Programs :D

Now I need the bleeding-edge glib 2.15.4.

• With Slackware, I would have just installed it.
• With ArchLinux, I would have had to write PKGBUILD files.
• With Ubuntu, I made a ‘dist-upgrade’..

Wanna know how it looks? well, you run gksu update-manager -u and it tells you ‘Ubuntu 8.0.x is available’! Install?

Isn’t it cool? Imagine how would it have been to have a ‘vista.exe’ to download from windows xp and it tells you this: downloading vista – installing vista – cleaning up – restarting the computer

I was able, just like from the livecd, to browse the web while the O.S. was updating. Till it upgraded firefox:D

Actually, restart is required mostly because of the kernel change (some executables won’t play at all).

This is one of the reasons ArchLinux is always releasing a ‘Duke Nukem’ release:

Sadly, Arch will never have a 1.0 release. It is, in fact, canceled. But this is for the best.

We’re changing gears and switching the way we do releases. Going forward, a new ISO will be released with each new kernel version. This will give us an easy milestone for us, and you, to follow.

That is, a new ISO with each ‘reboot required’.

I loove that, and I think the effort put into Ubuntu to ‘upgrade from XP to Vista’ is worth the pain only for a company that provides profession long-term support for the products.

But me, the developer, has to lose. The upgrade to the Alpha4 Hardy Heron made me spend 3 hrs of iwl3945 debugging. And it’s far from solved…

So, next time, pick a developer-friendly release!

*btw, you know what’s new in gnome 2.22? Alt-Shift-Tab for backwards switching of windows! yay!