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On 4/9/07, Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote: > You still didn't answer my question regarding whether you're talking about a > default install, or if tweaking the repo list is allowed. A cursory google > search lead me to this: > http://www.elijahlofgren.com/linux/ubuntu/#more-software > which seems to indicate that you do in fact need to tweak some things in > Ubuntu before you get access to all those repositories. This appears to be > reinforced by the fact that the local Ubuntu box I have can't find the > acroread package. Feisty has four hosted repositories, and one commercial repository (opera, realplayer, etc). I don't include the commercial repo. The four branches are: main restricted universe multiverse Canonical does not officially support any packages other than main/restricted, so if you call them for support on something like Acroread, you wont get it. Universe and multiverse are not enabled by default, but they are hosted by the Ubuntu repositories. This means you can trust your source, for the most part. With Red Hat/FC, I always needed to add repositories not hosted by the official FC repos, and that's very dangerous. You can't always trust those packages which have been built and offered by third parties. In any event, default Ubuntu install still has your FC6 beat hands down on the quite incorrect "wc -l" test... # aptitude search ~n | wc -l 6265 > If you allow that, then you can just as easily add a yum repo or two that has > the Adobe Flash player, mp3 libraries, mplayer with all the codecs, > proprietary nvidia/ati drivers, etc. Sun's Java is sort of a pain, but > hopefully since they GPL'd it there won't be redistribution issues anymore. Right, but were such packages built by your distributor or a third party? In Ubuntu's case, all packages will always be available. Who's to say that your third-party repo will stick around for the life of your distro? > My point is that the differences aren't as stark as you make it look. I'm > sure there /are/ differences in ease of use, etc, but if you know the distro, > they are pretty much in the noise, and which one "wins" is largely a matter of > personal taste and experience w.r.t. knowing where to look for help when > things don't work (or for those one liners that enable non-free repositories). Right. But I still don't concede my original point :-) Ie, here's how to enable all hosted Ubuntu repositories. No need for the user to go "searching" for repos on his own, and thereby potentially adding insecure repositories. Heh, maybe I should just setup my own Fedora repository and get tons of it's users to trust me, then one day, once I have 50,000 users, change the acroread package post install script to ping -f some servers. You see, I would be wary of third-party repositories. I learned that lesson a long time ago! # sed -i "s/main restricted$/main restricted universe multiverse/g" /etc/apt/source.list -- Kristian Hermansen -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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