After flirting with tech from 1989 onwards, Sam Varghese began to experiment with Linux in 1998. A couple of years later, he began using the Debian distribution as a single-boot system for his personal use. From that point onwards his interest grew and he has since written widely about free and open source software, with a great deal of his writings based on his own experiences, rather than anecdotal evidence. Open Sauce will focus on a genre of software that is present everywhere but rarely acknowledged; a genre that has little eye-candy but does most of the heavy lifting; a genre that is designed and written by people whose accomplishments are only occasionally recognised. Above all this blog will follow the KISS principle - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Was it Automatix or bad RAM that killed Ubuntu?

by Sam Varghese

Friday, 23 November 2007

Page 1 of 2 Three days after I concluded that Automatix had been behind the collapse of an Ubuntu install on iTWire editor Stan Beer's PC, there was an additional nugget of information about a second factor which could have contributed to the problem - a stick of RAM that had gone bad. Register now to win a Canon EOS 500D This came to light when Stan sent his box back to his system-builder to get an additional hard drive installed, the idea being to run Windows and Linux as a dual-boot system on separate drives. However, that does not exactly exonerate Automatix altogether because the software does cause some pretty weird behaviour on a Ubuntu 7.10 installation, judging from my own testing. I have Ubuntu 7.10 running on a PC built from old bits and pices - an Asus A7N8X motherboard, a AMD XP 2600 processor, a bog standard GeFORCE video card, an 80GB WD drive and 2 GB of RAM. Yes, it's not exactly downmarket even though I say old bits and pieces! After writing my last piece, I decided to walk into the lion's den myself and installed Automatix 2 on this box, using the instructions from the developers' website. That bit went okay, which is more than I can say for what happened later. Automatix is defined as "a free graphical package manager for the installation, uninstallation and configuration of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based Linux operating systems." One can install the following using Automatix: (once again this is taken from the offcial website): Acrobat Reader, Swiftweasel Browser & Plugins, Swiftdove, Extra Fonts (including MS Fonts, Liberation Fonts), Skype, Google Earth, dvdrip, Firefox MPlayer Plugin, Totem Xine, Google Picasa, Wine, w32dvdcodecs, nautilus scripts, Sun Java 6 JRE/JDK, Openoffice Clipart, xdvdshrink, checkgmail, Songbird, Crossover Office Standard 6.1.0, Crossover Office Professional 6.1.0, Devessentials, and Microsoft Office Open XML Converter. A few other applications are to be added shortly. I started Automatix and selected the w32dvdcodecs, extra fonts, dvdrip, Acrobat Reader and the Firefox MPlayer plugin. But after starting the process of applying these updates, I saw a message that some dependencies could not be met as some packages - which it listed - were missing. (This is the first time I have used a package manager on a Debian-based system and found that it will not do its basic task - which is to resolve dependencies and install the software I want.) << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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