[Pan-users] Re: Installation help in Ubuntu

[walt]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:32:54 +0000, Beartooth wrote:

> On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:29:46 +0000, walt wrote:
> 
...
>> Your sig file says you use Fedora.  Are you also running ubuntu?
> 
>       Well, sort of, and with lots of trouble -- under the subject line
> "VDQ : Triple Boot Advice?" there are details on Gmane's centos.general,
> fedora.general, and ubuntu.user lists, if you or any here would like to
> pitch in. Nutshell : I tried installing both CentOS and Ubuntu on a
> testbed machine, and came to grief; I'm about to try to start over.

I had a quick look at those other groups, and I remembered why I stopped
reading them long ago  -- too noisy for me, so I'll answer you here in
this peaceful group where my eyes don't hurt so much  :o)

If your major criterion for evaluating a linux distribution is whether
it supports Alpine -- please listen to some hard-earned good advice:

All linux distributions are almost exactly alike -- only the chrome
trim differs, and not by very much at that.  The one linux distro that
actually *is* just a bit different is gentoo, the difference being
that everything from top to bottom is compiled from the original
source code by you, on your own individual computer.  (This idea
was stolen by gentoo from the FreeBSD project, by the way, and
FreeBSD has been slowly but surely adopting all of the development
tools from the GNU project, and therefore looking more like linux
every year.)  But I digress.

The point I started to make is:  Alpine is absolutely trivial to
compile for yourself on *any* linux distribution, as long as you
have the basic 'development' packages installed, e.g. the gnu C
compiler (gcc) and any other libraries or toolkits your particular
application may need.  Alpine needs very few other packages, so
it's an ideal first program to compile for yourself on *any* linux
distribution.  Even good old pan is pretty trivial once you've
installed a few extra development packages first.

I also tried every linux distro I could get my hands on until I
finally realized that they are all the same.  I had decided that
I wanted to learn how to roll my own software, and so I settled
on gentoo.  But that's just a personal preference and not at all
required.  Any other linux distro will do very nicely, but it's
up to you to make sure the needed development tools are installed.

If you want to give it a shot, my email address is real and I'll
try to help when you get stuck.  (And you will :o)