Would anyone be interested in a talk or general discussion about
installation and package managers?
Installation of the current Linux distros work reasonably well for
common hardware but purchasing an interesting peripheral can be a
gamble.
Even when they claim to be Linux compatible, hardware vendors don't
always provide clear installation instructions for their products.
On the way to the April OCLUG meeting, someone described purchasing a
USB wifi product that claimed to work with Linux. However, the
instructions weren't very detailed, consisting of "get the source and
compile it". They mentioned that a custom kernel might be required.
After the meeting, someone who was attending for the first time asked
if we ever have talks or sessions about installations that require
compiling source code.
Would it be worth having a discussion about this or a panel of people
with experience installing various hardware?
The discussion could be of use to novices (adding software sources) to
how to compile and install drivers.
Eg:
- Adding repositories to the package manager so this can work:
apt-get install acroread
- Describe some command line features
aptitude search gnupg
i gnupg - GNU privacy guard - a free PGP replacement
p gnupg-agent - GNU privacy guard - password agent
i gnupg-curl - GNU privacy guard - a free PGP replacement (cURL)
p gnupg-doc - GNU Privacy Guard documentation
...
Gnupg documentation is available but not installed.
Any rich text, or html editors?
aptitude search editor | grep -i rich
p fckeditor - rich text format javascript web editor
aptitude search editor | grep -i html
p kimagemapeditor - HTML image map editor for KDE 4
p kimagemapeditor-kde3 - HTML image map editor for KDE
- Other package managers?
- Building from source?
make config
make
make install
Depending on the range of topics, this could take an entire meeting.
Comments?
Suggestions?
roland