[ILUG] To ubuntu or not to ubuntu

[Justin Mason]

Timothy Murphy writes:
> I recently bought a ThinkPad T43 which is running beautifully
> (thank you, rf, if you are listening).
> 
> The previous owner was running Ubuntu + Gnome,
> so despite the fact that my religion is Fedora + KDE,
> I thought I'd see what Ubuntu was like.
> 
> I should say that I have always thought of Ubuntu
> as a rather nerd-ish distribution.
> I'm not prejudiced, but ... in my experience
> most people running Ubuntu drink too much,
> need a haircut and have bizarre political views.

I think you're confusing it with UNIX in general...

> However, I was quite impressed with Ubuntu at first sight.
> 
> Incidentally, I was amazed how easy it is 
> to change the superuser password under Linux
> by re-booting in single mode.
> (The previous owner had just set up a user account for me.)
> Isn't this rather a big security hole in Linux?
> [Can one do anything similar under Windows?]
> 
> But to return to Ubuntu.
> I ran (as root) "apt-get upgrade"
> and then "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"
> (I was missing the familiar smell of KDE),
> and in both cases the download ended with the apparent error:
> ======================
> Setting up f-prot-installer (0.5.21) ...
> installing f-prot
> Downloading file fp-linux-ws.tar.gz.md5 from ftp://ftp.f-prot.com/pub/linux/
> No such directory `pub/linux/'.
> 
>     Download failed. Please make sure that
>     your computer is connected to the Internet.
>     If you see this error although you are
>     connected, either the server is down or the
>     download location has changed. In the latter
>     case you can still download the files manually.
>     Please file a bug report against
>     f-prot-installer!
> dpkg: error processing f-prot-installer (--configure):
>  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  f-prot-installer
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
> ======================
> 
> Is this just added as a hurdle for Ubuntu newbies,
> to see if they have attained a high enough level of geekdom?
> 
> I await the voice of the Oracle.

That looks like a broken attempt to package the F-Prot scanner as a Debian
package, which was then installed by the previous owner and never
completely installed (due to the hacked-up FTP brokenness evident above).

Your best bet, in my opinion, would be to remove the f-prot-installer
installer package before re-attempting the kubuntu upgrade:

    sudo apt-get remove --purge f-prot-installer

(there may be a more aggressive removal command required, but I'd
leave that to the dpkg wizards.)

For what it's worth, I use Kubuntu as frequently as I can, but I'm
considering moving back to Fedora nowadays, for a number of reasons:

  - The "edgy" release was just too flaky; a clean dist-upgrade from
    "dapper" on commodity (Dell) hardware, which should have been pretty
    painless, was instead a nightmare of misplaced Xorg config files and
    whatnot;

  - Ubuntu kernels have recently had a tendency to release new kernel
    versions without a matching "restricted-modules" package, which could
    have resulted in a broken boot if I hadn't spotted it in time.
    not good release practice;

  - similarly, the Ubuntu kernel-building system (for custom
    patching/modules) is a nightmare;

  - Fedora support for SpamAssassin is better (in that it exists ;)
    hell, Warren Togami's practically a member of our dev team nowadays,
    and was a great help when we designed sa-update.

--j.