Common problems with Ubuntu

[geoffrey mendelson]

On May 12, 2010, at 8:22 AM, Gilboa Davara wrote:
>
> Though, I doubt that the OP will care if he's installing Linux from a
> single LiveCD or from an installation DVD. (I would assume that if  
> he's
> talking about multiple machines, the DVD version will be far less
> bandwidth hog)



Actually it does not matter. Just about all of the modern distros  
dowload their add ons or updates to a staging directory. Some of them  
have cleanup set to run by cron, some never clean up, waiting for you  
to do it manually.

All you have to do is to turn off cleanup (deleting old package files)  
on a "master" computer and then point the "slaves" to it's staging  
directory.

UBUNTU does have a process where you can sync the packages installed  
on one computer with another. You do it by listing the status of all  
packages to a file, input the file to the package manager on the other  
computer and then tell it to install anything it now thinks should be  
installed and isn't. I think that is done via dpkg, so any debian  
based system will do the same thing.

Note that you may have to do a grep to remove uninstalled packages  
from the list, or it will happily go along and remove anything that is  
on the second system, but not the first.

I think that you probably would not want to run auto updates, and for  
that version avoid a distro like Fedora , with it's constant updates,  
because it becomes a moving target as it were, and makes development  
that much more difficult. The last thing a programmer needs is to find  
that what worked yesterday fails because over night a new version of  
the compiler or a library was installed.

It has happened to me with various distros, because I am "overnight"  
to them and they uploaded an update of several libraries that were in  
separate packages over several hours. I just happened to get the  
update midway and only had some of the libraries updated, which caused  
the application to crash.
  :-)

Geoff.

-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge  
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