[plug] Newbys guide

[Kev]

Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 17:43 +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> 

>>At one point I used a shareware Windows programme running under WINE
>>in Linux to do this.  There's also gramofile (included in Debian)
>>which does declicking of music from records and audacity (also in
>>Debian) which is supposed to be a good audio editor but has a pretty
>>unintuitive interface.

Yes I know about grammofile, but I have no multimedia.

> To be honest, I've always found the easiest way to do this was just to
> use `cdrecord'.
> 
> $ cdrecord dev=n,n,n -audio track1.wav track2.wav track3.wav ...
> 
> where dev= is found with cdrecord -scanbus. It "just works" with none of
> the painful stuffing about I've usually found is necessary in GUI CD
> burning utilities.

To get me started I want point 'n' shoot.
> 
> 
>>>Well, another thing which should be there is the ability to un-install 
>>>applications just as easilly as installing them.
>>
>>Agreed.  The problem is that a lot of free software authors seem to
>>think that making installation and removal easy is the job of
>>distributors (such as Debian, Red Hat, and so on).  It's a tricky
>>problem in itself; this e-mail is already quite long enough without me
>>going into it and there was an, er, lively discussion on this list
>>about the matter when it was raised in 2003.

This a problem with Linux - one reason why it's still a long way short 
of being a realistic alternative to Windoze for 99.9% of the Population
> 
> 
> For now, the best options are:
> 	- Use your distributor's packages
> 	- Use 3rd party packages for your distro
> 	- If you have to compile it, use --prefix to drop it in a
>           separate directory like /usr/local/appname . That way you
>           can just delete the directory when you want to get rid of it.
>         - Use something like checkinstall to automatically make packages
>           from custom-built software. I haven't used this myself.
> 
> I do agree that it'd be nice if it was easier to install and remove
> apps, but I guess it doesn't bother me much personally. If there was a
> bit more compatibility between distros, it'd just be a matter of making
> packages and the problem's gone - but right now you have to make
> packages for half a million different distros and versions, so it's just
> too painful for the original software developer to do.
> 
> That said, some software is also available as SRPMs that'll build on
> almost all systems (the Cyrus IMAPd RPMs are a good example of this).
> That seems like a relatively sane approach.
> 
> If you use your distro's package management system, removing apps should
> be a non-issue.

There we are, back into the greek again.

Cheers Kev