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I have been using Debian for at least 8 months now, although I have been experimenting with it for more than 2 years. However, I haven't installed anything using the mysterious debian way! I fear that, if I install a package that way, I may not be able to remove it afterwards!
I think, the so mysterious debian way, has to do with commands like:
souneedalink wrote:the debian way - no quick shortcuts today that leads to problems tommorrow, take the long way and do it right
As far as installing apps goes, the long way is very rarely right in Debian! That's one of the main reasons I chose Debian — I'd heard great things about its package management system. And it IS good. apt-get is easier and safer than any other method.
The "mysterious Debian way" the original poster mentioned is really the mysterious Unix way. I think it's fine NOT to know how to do it. That is one of the luxuries of being a Debian user.
As others have said, the Debian way is more than just using specific toolchains, its a philosophy. Debian, after all, is not just a distro, but a community. The Debian System: Concepts and Techniques by Martin Krafft is a great book that explains the history of Debian, its goals, philosophy, and technical usage.
In these situations when you have no choice but to compile from source (because software XYZ is not available in a Debian repo) it is preferable to use checkinstall to make a deb out of the source code. Your .deb will not be eligible for upload to Debian proper but it will fit in fine and is easily managed w/ apt-get (or Synaptic). So....instead of using make install try this:
Keep in mind that sometimes checkinstall does not work for some source code. In this case (if you absolutely must have the software) you must use make install.
That means, I made the right decision in choosing Debian. With Windows, I was noticing, that the inner workings of the OS and the software, were intentionally hidden from the user. That often left me in a state of anger and disgust, because I knew that, to use a tool effectively, one must know the tool inside out. I was feeling like being treated as a mentally deficient person! Moreover, I was angry at the fact that, the programs were so overladen with unnecessary graphics, that they brought my computer to a crippling state. Once, I wanted to check the features of the computer's processor and downloaded an executable from the manufacturer's website. The program was almost 2 Mega Bytes long! It was so long because of too much graphics! A simple program employing a simple EDIT control would have been more than enough!!!
mzilikazi wrote:So....instead of using make install try this:
Lots of people (including Martin Krafft, whose book, The Debian System, is mentioned above) believe that checkinstall is a disaster and unfit to be used on any Linux system, let alone one as worthy as Debian.
Lots of people (including Martin Krafft, whose book, The Debian System, is mentioned above) believe that checkinstall is a disaster and unfit to be used on any Linux system, let alone one as worthy as Debian.
And his suggestion is to use what instead? Please don't say make install.
What's wrong with "make install". That's certainly what I use on the rare occasions I can't find a correctly assembled .deb file.
The key to successfully using ./configure; make; make install is to leave the make directory in place so that you can run "make uninstall" if the need arises.
I've preferred ./configure make make install over dpkg -i deb's that aren't in the repo's. I'd rather build something specifically with the libraries on my system than take a 3rd party deb file and install it. So even if I see a deb for something I want, I take the tar.bz file instead and build. If it later comes into Debian I can easily make uninstall and install our version instead.
I did that recently with brasero when it was briefly removed from Lenny, although it still feels weird that I returned to the older Debian version and cannot fathom why the maintainer hasn't started working on the newer upstream releases of it. His page says he's "watching" it. Why doesn't he put it into Sid so more people can work on whatever bugs there may be? Brasero seems to be the future of GUI burning in Gnome. Seems to me the package should be more actively kept up with than it is. That's already a wish list bug so I haven't bothered to post up another one, which would only duplicate that.
Thankfully, there's very little that isn't in the Debian or debian-multimedia repo's.
Lenovo z560 Laptop Nvidia GeForce 310m Hitachi 500GB HD Intel HD Audio 4GB RAM
Ok, that might be a stupid question but every package is source code before being a .deb package, no ? So there must be some kind of "safe" way to turn source code into a package, installable by apt, in order to keep track of everything with apt... no ?