[OZAPRS] Rasbian

vk2tv vk2tv at exemail.com.au
Sun Jul 3 08:45:18 AEST 2016


Bob,

The flexibility of Linux often leads to numerous ways of achieving an 
end result. Below are my thoughts on repos. Others may disagree with me.

On 02/07/16 22:31, Bob wrote:
> Yes Ray I stuffed that up, MATE is the GUI
So many choices, but Mate is also my desktop of choice. I could never 
get used to Gnome having the task bar at the top.
>
> So what you are saying is, when I go looking for Ham Radio stuff to 
> download I have to make sure I get it from the Mint repository.
It's not set in concrete, but the safest way to get and install software 
is to get it from your distribution's repository for the particular 
release you have installed.
> Would my package manager or software manage ensure I get stuff from 
> the right repository?
> What about when I use ~$ apt-get install xyz?  How will I know if I 
> have the right repository?
When a distro is installed the installation process includes the "right" 
(safe) repositories for that distro and, the list is stored in 
/etc/apt/sources.list (for Debian based systems). Package managers like 
dselect, aptitude, synaptic and apt-get all refer to 
/etc/apt/sources.list. You can add repositories from other sources but 
there is no guarantee you won't run into dependency issues. Another 
distro might modify a library, for example, and give it a different 
name. When that happens, your distro looks for the name it knows, and 
because it can't find it, spits a dependency error. I'm not saying it 
'will' happen that way, only that it can.

> So Linux Mint is a distribution on its own and there is no guarantee 
> that something which runs on Ubuntu will run on Mint?
> I've just been lucky so far.
It depends on how much Mint has modified the Ubuntu packages, if at all 
in any particular case. If package A is available from Ubuntu there's a 
very good chance it's also available in Mint, and in that case it's 
preferable to get it from the Mint repo. In my experience the advantage 
that Mint offered over Ubuntu was the speed with which the former fixed 
software issues, but I don't know if that's still the case because I've 
long moved away from Mint and have gone back to pure Debian, using their 
Testing branch repos.

My preference list would be ...
1. use the repo for your distro
2. use a third party repo but be aware there might be issues.
3. install from a third-party .deb file (if one exists; and there might 
be issues)
4. compile the software from sources, which is not as scary as it might 
at first appear to be but it might spit errors.

However, for xastir, for example, for which a package is available, I 
always compile from the source code. It used to be that the packaged 
version was years out of date, but that is no longer the case, and I'm 
set in my ways!

>
> Linux is certainly more interesting than Winblows. Good exercise for 
> the brain.
The only time I reply on Windows these days is for Photoshop, because 
GIMP (on Linux) isn't quite there yet. My laptop is dual boot 
Windows/Linux but my desktop computer is Linux only. Linux is certainly 
a steep learning curve but it's worth the journey.

>
> On 02/07/16 16:18, vk2tv wrote:
>
> I'm aware of the 32bit issue and have only been downloading 32bit stuff.
> I wish there was an easy way to go to 64bit but I don't think there is 
> much of a speed advantage for the stuff I do. Its never been an issue.
You'd have to install a 64 bit version from scratch and then you could 
use both 32 and 64 bit libraries

Ray vk2tv

>
> Thanks Ray, regards Bob vk2byf
>>
>> If you're running 32 bit Linux Mint on a 64 bit processor you can 
>> only run 32 bit debs, so mismatch there can't be an issue.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>> Ray vk2tv
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> O
>
>
>
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