Woah! apt-get is great!

[Cyrix_2k]

I've been trying to install kismet for the last two hours and have been having HUGE problems with library requirements. First it started with libUSB, which I successfully installed. Then I needed libpcap, which needed flex... I couldn't get it to work. Now I finally heard about apt-get for debian (I'm running MEPIS) and typed "apt-get install kismet". It works! Wow, this makes linux MUCH easier to use.

 

[Ocelaris]

Yeah, almost TOO easy... makes me feel ashamed not having to make everything but hey, if it gets me on board finally, I'm all for it!

 

[MRD]

Yeah, that's called "dependency hell", and it's why most of us will only use distros with good package management, such as either apt (present in debian, ubuntu, mepis, and lots of others) or portage (gentoo). This is why a lot of us hate red hat, fedora, mandriva, suse, etc. They lack this automatic package management (there are no official package repositories for yum beyond the cd's).

 

[Flamed_Chip]

Yeah, almost TOO easy... makes me feel ashamed not having to make everything but hey, if it gets me on board finally, I'm all for it!

Apt-get is a fine tool. Don't feel ashamed using binary packages, most of the time it makes more sense than compiling things from source, especially on an older machine. Though that sounds a bit wrong coming from a devout Gentoo users.

 

[MRD]

There isn't usually a huge speed advantage compiling from source, the main advantage is that you have a lot more control over compile time options. For example, you can easily build in suppor for lirc on a mythtv system or mysql in qt, etc. With binaries, there's no way to do this, and it can create a lot of issues.

Even on a fast system though, the compile times can be very long for some packages. It's not bad for me as I use distcc and distribute compilation over 10 athlon level systems, but on a single slow system it can be very painful.

 

[kel_p]

Man, this reminds me of the "gentoo-feeling", do it yourself, when I started Gentoo I felt like I created Linux from scratch! Still, the advantage in performance I never really saw, hardly anyway..
I eventually came back to home sweet Debian.

And yeah.. Debian package management is great.

 

[klingens]

Use aptitude.

PS: MEPIS is not Debian. Quoth dpkg:

 <dpkg> You're not running Debian, but a distribution that uses the same package management system, but not the same packages.  You
             can't use packages from Debian with Ubuntu, or packages from Mepis with Knoppix. That is why we cannot help you, you will need
             to visit the IRC channels of the respective distributions. See <Ubuntu> <Knoppix> <Kanotix> <Mepis>