[TriLUG] Ubuntu 11.04 Release Party, April 28, Chapel Hill

[Bill Farrow]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:12 AM,  <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:
> to me like the main-line Ubuntu Overlords, or whatever you would call

"Community leaders" perhaps, or maybe by Canonical directly.  As with
any large, community, open source or not, you need to have some form
of leadership to help keep focus.  They make errors from time to time,
and they hopefully recognize their mistakes and correct them.  It is
one of the more open and inclusive open source groups that I have come
across.

> them, have decided that Unity is the way it is going to go and that the
> change will be forced upon the users; as opposed to making it an option.

It is a standard option when you log in, just choose to "Classic Ubuntu".

> both want and have the capability to customize my applications a bit more

Which is why there are a growing number of Personal Package Archives
(PPA) so that you can create your custom packages and then share them.

> For example, I was looking yesterday at downloading a package from source
> and being able to customize the build options.  Unfortunately, there
> doesn't seem to be anything like the equivalent of a Slackbuilds script,

Debian packaging files can be daunting, and Debian provides some
helper scripts (dpkg-dev) to make this easier.  There are plenty of
howtos:
http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2006/04/21/building-modified-debian-packages/

On the other hand, if your building from straight tarballs, you can
use "checkinstall" to keep track of "make install" actions and allow
for easy uninstallation using the system package manager.


Bill