On package management

So far, things are going well with Kubuntu. I was able to copy my mouse configuration from Slackware without any problems, and I was able to run the setkeycodes commands for my Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard at boot time after looking up a Debian Debian equivalent to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. The only real problem I had was with the SDL audio drivers. When I installed some SDL applications, the automatic dependency resolution installed libsdl1.2debian-oss, which obviously doesn't work when the system uses ALSA. This was easily fixed by installing the libsdl1.2debian-all package instead.

And speaking of packages, I am very pleased with package management so far. For one thing, the number of packages available for Kubuntu is very good - better than the Slackware selection you can find on LinuxPackage.net, which isn't too bad itself. The automatic downloading and dependency resolution of APT is quite nice too. Of course, you can get that in Slackware using Swaret or one of the comparable tools, but with APT, you get the added benefit that it's actually officially supported as part of the distribution. Swaret, Slapt-get and whatever other tools are out there are unofficial, not supported everywhere, and seem to be somewhat mistrusted by the community.

As for Kynaptic, the default APT interface, it's not terrible, but it's not that good either. The interface is pretty spartan and somewhat unpolished (when displaying menu names in the status bar, somebody forgot to strip the ampersands for the accelerators). It's also very short on functionality. It lists packages and lets you install, remove, or upgrade them, but that's pretty much it. It shows short summaries as tool-tips and doesn't show details at all. It also has no interface for configuring APT.

I'm actually surprisingly disappointed in Kynaptic. I wasn't really thrilled with QtSwaret, but it at least tried to be feature-complete, including package details and a Swaret configuration interface. And compared to the slick look of the Xandros Network tool, Kynaptic just feels very amateurish. With work, I'm sure Kynaptic could be very good, but right now, it just feels like there's too much missing to use it as the default package management tool. In the mean time, I may have to give Synaptic a try, despite the fact that it's based on GTK+.

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    Synaptic

    I've gone ahead and installed Synaptic on all my Kubuntu boxen. It's GTK but it works well and gives much more power.

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