I've been fighting with my Linux box for quite some time. I recently installed
apt from a corel CD I got from a magazine. I must say, I am very impressed!
After fighting with limited success with dselect and dpkg, I really like apt.
The first thing I did was to fix my slightly broken installation. I had
installed xmms on my slink system and broke a few things in the process. Using
apt, I fixed this, but removed xmms in the process. I then changed the
source.list to point to unstable and used apt to get sane, as I needed 1.01
instead of 0.74 Imagine my surprise when, after installing loads of stuff, and
re-booting to recognise my scanner, not only did it correctly recognise my AGFA
1236 SCSI scanner, which I thought needed a new back-end from Kevin to work AND
major tweaking with the scanner list, but it also updated gimp AND set-up
xscanimage as a plug-in as well!!! After the re-boot, I was able to open gimp,
scan a picture without having to tweak anything! Brilliant! I also got xmms back
the same way.
I did have some problem when I tried to update timidity. This installed perl
5.004 and perl 5.005, along with debconf, xaw-wrappers, esound and several
others. Unfortunately, after successfully installing perl, debconf, and
xaw-wrappers failed for something rather strange, and therefore timidity and the
others wouldn't install. I don't have the details with me, but I'll probably
just wait until potato is stable and update it again. I thought I'd just do an
apt-get upgrade, but I didn't have enough disk space. I do have a lot of junk on
my system from the original install. As I get to learn more about Linux, I'll
start cleaning it out.
I just wanted to let you know how impressed I was when sane not only installed,
but even configured itself properly for my scanner and gimp without a single
prompt! This is what software installation should be like. Great job!
Cheers,
John Gay
