After several weeks of trying to work with Ubuntu, I still don't have a basic working system for me. I wanted to install Apache 1.3 with modperl and modssl, Axkit, a VNC client, the latest prisim drivers, and a few libraries, such as zlib, libxml2 and libxslt.
While in some areas Synaptic has proved useful, in all of the above I have to resort to attempting to compile from source. Unfortunately, various development tools, basic libraries and header files seem to be missing. Trying to configure, compile and install them has been far too troublesome for my liking. In fact the only ones I've managed to do successfully are Apache/modperl/modssl. And that was after a lot of work extricating Apache2 from the setup. If you don't do it manually, the dependancy tree goes haywire trying to uninstall virtually the whole distribution. I also don't like the fact that package dependencies don't seem to understand that perl5.8 is an upgrade from perl5.6. So many packages insist on uninstall perl5.8 and installing perl5.6. Extremely annoying.
There have been other problems too, such as the USB port not responding, and the battery monitor failing to report anything but 0%. Although this could be the way the kernal was compiled. I've tried to recompile the kernal with the latest version, but that has so far failed due to missing headers. /me shakes head :(
It feels like I have downgraded from RH9 rather than upgraded. I guess I'm just the wrong target market for Ubuntu.
I guess I'll be looking at downloading Fedora Core over the weekend. Although I do have a fairly recent Suse disk somewhere. Maybe I'll give that a go. I don't believe I could do worse. I don't feel brave enough to try a Gentoo install. The poor brick is likely to take a week just to compile the initial build!
I think most of your trouble stems from the fact you did not enable the "Universe" apt source yet. This contains all the packages that are part of Debian, which Ubuntu provides but does not actively support. Here's more information.
Re:Enable the Universe and Multiverse Sources
barbie on 2005-04-23T09:07:46
No the trouble came from the inital CD install, and all the Ubuntu repositories that were initially set up (including universe). Adding the other debian repositories helped to find more packages, but most still have some awkward dependancies.Building from source, theorectically should be more time consuming, but cleaner. With the case of Apache it was quicker, but everything has been difficult and a mess to get working.
The problem comes from the fact, IMO, that Ubuntu is not packaged to be a development environment.
build-essential, ssh-server, etc).
sorry it didn't work out for you
I don't know which distro is better for you, but I've adapted my Ubuntu to do most of the things you seem to want and it works well for me. I got the whole apache/mod_perl/mod_php business working with XAMPP. If you want a binary, you could give that a try, I suppose. I only use the laptop as a dev environment, so a binary Apache was fine with me.
Dunno. Is there way I can help ? The forums are quite gentle, I assure you.. and even the IRC channel is pretty decent, if you want to give those a shot.