As some of you know, I’ve installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my project machine after some hassle with the Windows Activation guys. I’m very familiar with LiveCDs, using puppylinux on my laptop, and Ubuntu Desktop is a live OS which also lets you install directly to the HDD.
A couple of evenings ago I had it up and running, and fount out – to my surprise – that none of the commands I’d used previously (in KDE) worked. Because Ubuntu is GNOME…
No worries! With the built-in packet manager it’s easier to update this system than Windows Update ever was! To switch from GNOME to KDE, or Ubuntu to Kubuntu in this case, simply download and install the Kubuntu-desktop package. You don’t have to re-start the computer or nothing. Just log out and check for KDE session (as opposed to GNOME or ‘previous’).
Then I got errors when I tried to compile a utility for my USB wifi adapter.
Nothing worked, and I sat there like a question mark, my head up my ass, and my cousin not responding on Gaim.
I missed a file called gtk+-2.0.pc which belongings to the Gnome Tool Kit.
That is, I didn’t miss it, but the white on black terminal was clearly telling me that it felt completely abandoned without it.
But I knew that I already had it installed. It asked for version 2.6 the least, but I found out I had 2.8 installed. So then what?
Snooping around I found an excellent tip.
If configure whines about missing files, they are dev files. Up with my favourite package manager (Adept) and filter for files ending with -dev.
Download and install libgtk2.0-dev.
But then I got a more serious error.
I lit up a cigarette and looked at the watch. I’d been sitting there for four hours, flipping through tutorials and such, mostly because I looked for info on ‘installing’ instead of ‘compiling’. Installing is something you do with a ready-made package, compiling something you do when you’ve got the source code in a tarball.
My biggest difficulty with linux is not the OS itself but the terminology.
It doesn’t resemble anything from Microsoft’s world. Which is perfectly natural, considering they are completely different architectures.
The serious error read: Kernel sources cannot be found
Didn’t sound good at all. In fact, I thought it sounded like something along the lines of: Lifeboats cannot be found.
I felt like screaming for somebody: Where the hell are my sources? Then I remembered that I’m the only one in my support department. I’m the only person sitting here, two am in the morning, actually.
But I found a way to do it. It didn’t say anywhere, but in the late night haze and halfway into lala-land, things began to make sense. At first it scared me, then I thought, ‘what the heck, it’s not like the computer will burst into flames or something.’ That is yet to be seen, but right now I feel like I’ve single-handedly beaten a whale to death.
When
make
make install
finally returned no errors, I was looking around, chest all pumped up, thinking: ‘where are the chicks?’
‘Cause I have always been among those who believe that chicks immediately recognize a man of great accomplishments.
For more info you can just read the post I wrote on the Kubuntu forums.
You are alpha male, hear your roar!
Now, just stick with it, and when you have to use someone else’s windows machine, you’ll feel like you’ve been banished to some purgatorial realm, and the cursing… the cursing will be rich indeed, unlike anything you’ve experienced compiling source in Linux.
At least that’s how I feel.
Haha, Sigg3… Very nice. Its wierd because I had read about someone having a similar problem with Ubuntu (and Kubuntu). So I was going to mention that you get the dev package, until I read on and found you figured that out. :) Nice job, manly man.
Chicks have gone home with those guys from the finance department while you were wrestling with your computer. Heh.
Fucking finance department.
Ah, who needs them anyway!
*ROAR*