Linuxlore

Without further ado I shall dive straight in with the warning that whenever you install a piece of software you should trust where you are getting it from. If you’ve chosen to use Ubuntu then presumably you’ve decided you trust the Ubuntu development process, but when you click on a link to download some software from a web site you need to be sure you’re on the correct site and that you trust those that run the site.

OK, with that out the way, I thought that I’d do a quick blog about the ease of installing .deb packages within Ubuntu (clearly I’m in a bit of a blogging mood today - something of a rarity!). I first stumbled across this a while ago when I decided to install the Opera browser alongside my usual Firefox install. I headed off to the Opera website to download the .deb file that I knew, from previous Debian installs, would be there. What I was expecting to do was download it, do a test install run with aptitude -s to check for any missing dependencies and then, after installing any missing items, install Opera - all via the trusty, familiar command line.

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Following on from the fun I’ve been having getting wireless cards working under Ubuntu (or Linux in general for that matter) I found a bit of a glitch in the 7.04 install I’m running on my laptop. So a matter of days before the release of 7.10 I’m beating 7.04 into submission! The story goes a little like this:

After using a pretty standard Ubuntu install with Gnome for a while I decided to switch back to my preferred XFCE desktop. This was fairly straightforward, although the xubuntu-desktop package pulled in a few things I didn’t want, so I used it to populate the new install list (in Synaptic) and then trimmed the packages I didn’t want (mainly the office applications since I prefer to stick with OpenOffice). One thing I noted after making the switch back was that there was no Network Manager applet running, and a quick check of the package details seemed to indicate that it was part of Gnome, so I decided to look elsewhere for an equivalent. I experimented briefly with Wicd, but whilst doing that I found out that, although Network Manager is part of Gnome it is pretty free of Gnome dependencies and is largely independent, so I decided to switch back. Having done that I needed to look for a way of getting the applet running. This seemed simple enough, I just needed to add an entry into the Autostarted applications list as accessed from Applications -> Settings. Having done this all seemed well until, after a few reboots I noticed that I had multiple copies of the nm-applet in the panel - oops!

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