Ubuntu – Painful re-install » $ thought

I installed ubuntu 6.06 LTS on my machine. I was on the ride of happiness I liked everything, right from the starting sound to shutting down screen! Some notable features are -

Package manager - This really helps. You can choose which packages / libraries to download / install and just download them. That really gives you lot of choice to work with.
Device support - I experienced the seamless operation of many devices. My thumb-drive and digital camera were instantly installed and ready to use. No more website searching for drivers.
DVD, Mp3 & other playback - Though I was required to download libraries to run non-free media formats, but that's OK. I could finally listen to my songs while I work

This list could have many more points which you can easily see from other ubuntu related blogs. Enough praising!

There are still areas where Ubuntu needs to work-out. I felt a major reason was re-installing ubuntu. All the packages and libraries which were downloaded from internet are totally lost! You need to start-over again for setting up those applications! On the top of it, to increase our difficulties the names of libraries and applications are very difficult to remember or cryptic. To play DVDs you need to use "xine" and for playing songs "Rhythembox". Why we don't use simple names like MusicBox or MoviePlayer? Library dependencies, names and other problems might be solvable by geeks, but normal users will switch back to Windows than wasting time on googleling for How-To's!

Even those people who have knowledge of installing will not do because its painful and time-consuming task. There should be a way by which we should be able to restore our application profile or at-least you should be able to generate a automatic script which you run for next time and restore your desktop as before.

Neelesh

Ram Ram Sir! Kay challay.
Coming to point I felt you really know what is to be done to improve Ubantu so that it really works for people.
The points you listed were helpfull in understanding what kind of real time problemes jump in when desgning an OS.
Though I dont at all use “Linux”, I will be looking forward to do so.
Thanks.
http://jobezone.wordpress.com/ jobezone

Yes, the synaptic package manager can be a bit daunting, in that it lists all packages (10000+ of them), many of them with strange names. But they follow a standard, so with time you’ll start to understand them. For example, those starting with “lib” are libraries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_%28computer_science%29).
Or you could use gnome-app-install (the last option in the applications menu) which only shows end-user applications.

Debian developers are developing debtags, which adds tag support to packages. I think that in the future we’ll see graphical package managers take advantage of it, so for example, you would be able to specify you want to find see all games, which are 3D, and are simulations, and as a result get flightgear and other aviation simulations.

Welcome to gnu/linux!
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Jude DaShiell

Please as root install system-config-kickstart as soon as possible! Run it and answer all questions and you’ll make a kickstart script that can install your base system for you. Edit the %post lines at the nd and add in all of those other packages you want from remote locations correctly and you will be golden.
Jude DaShiell

I forgot to mention, save the kickstart script to a floppy and if something happens to your install, you can reinstall while having dinner. ubuntu kickstart scripting is a bit different from fedora so read up on documentation and make yourself aware. You’ll be needing a bunch of wget -b remote-package-name commands for that %post section and whatever other commands you needed to run to get those suckers extracted and built and installed.