Common problems with Ubuntu

[Baruch Even]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 7:43 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:

> On Tuesday 11 May 2010 16:04:29 Amos Shapira wrote:
> > On 11 May 2010 22:01, geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendelson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > On May 11, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > >> Ubuntu packages three Javas, but only the Sun Java has any worth. The
> > >> other two only serve to mess up Sun Java installs. Stay away from
> > >> them.
> > >
> > > Ouch, that brings back another UBUNTU problem. It does not install Java
> > > (are most programs) in /usr/bin. It installs them in /usr/bin under
> > > another name, or eleswhere. Then it links /etc/alternatives/<name> to
> > > them. Then it links /usr/bin/<name> to /etc/alternatives/<name>.
> >
> > That's actually part of the inheritance from Debian. Debian tends to
> > have a long history behind most of their decisions so this system
> > makes sense there. I'm not sure how different is Ubuntu from it
> > though.
> >
>
> Last time I checked (Debian 3.1 or so), Debian did not take the
> /etc/alternatives system to its natural conclusion though. I noticed that
> when
> I wanted to install postfix on what was then eskimo.iglu.org.il, I had to
> uninstall qmail (which I wanted to get rid of eventually), because the
> /usr/sbin/sendmail file conflicted between the two packages. Later on, when
> I
> worked on Fedora, I was able to install Postfix as well as sendmail (the
> Fedora default) because I could play with the symlinks in /etc/alternatives
> and other places. It's possible it was fixed in Debian since then.
>

qmail was not packaged in Debian since it was non-free, not sure about its
status nowadays. If you install something yourself or from an unofficial
package you can not blame Debian for its failures.

Baruch
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20100512/1f87e321/attachment.html>