VVDQ : Alpine on Ubuntu??

[Derek Broughton]

Beartooth Testbedder wrote:

>> Again, you don't really give us enough context, but at a guess I'd say
>> you have used "su" (evil!) or "sudo -i" to get a root shell, and are now
>> trying to run qtparted with predictable results.  Use "kdesudo qtparted"
>> from your _own_ shell (though I think you need to give it a disk name).
> 
> Well, with respect, from where I stand it's sudo that's evil. I'm no Alpha
> Plus Technoid, nor was meant to be.

Nor do you need to be.

> When I found out I'd have to learn vi 
> just to set it up, I abandoned all hope of it. 

You don't - I'm not sure what hopeless terminal geek-case came up with the
name "visudo", but it (at least in Debian/Ubuntu) runs your EDITOR, not vi
(though the documentation implies that that's not the default case on other
distros).  In my case, EDITOR is "joe", and it uses joe.  I'm rather
surprised that every distro doesn't come with both a "visudo" and
an "emacsudo" command :-)

> But, being fortunately in 
> possession of machines no one else ever touches (Do not do this at work!),
> I simply took to keeping one gnome terminal tab logged into root all the
> time -- with certain precautions, of course. That was at least ten years
> back, and I'm getting old ...

However, in Ubuntu you already have sudo configured for you if you're the
only person using the machine.
> 
> What's a disk name??

/dev/sda, /dev/hda, etc.  I don't have qtparted installed, so I could be
wrong about needing that, anyway (in fact, I suspect I must be, as I _do_
have parted, and I see it defaults to my only internal hd).

> OK; the place I looked to find about repos must have confused me. I, if
> not my wife, will need apps that neither synaptic nor the other installer
> seems able out of the box to get. (The other I mean seems to be called
> Package Manager, and to use "usr/bin/gnome-app-install" to install.

Both should have options to change the repositories - they use the same
basic configuration, even if they use different front-ends.  In synaptic,
the option is under "Settings / Repositories" and you should be able to
just find a check-box for "universe"

> The springing point may be your 'after enabling the universe repository'
> -- which may prove non-trivial. Again, food for another thread.

No, it should be easy.

> Hmmm -- 'generally safe' meaning perhaps simply that it's known not to be
> malware?

No, meaning it's going to prompt you before doing anything and if you tell
it to install something that you have no reason to believe is really
required for your package, you'll get what you deserve. :-)


> Aha! Ein altes Wort bewaehrt sich leider auch an mir : it's not what you
> don't know that does the big damage. It's what you think you know, that
> ain't so.

LOL - well that rather applies to my comment above :-)  

> But the next one ran into lots of brambles. So I tried this :
> 
> btth at SblzUb:~$ cd /etc/apt
> btth at SblzUb:/etc/apt$ ls
> apt.conf    secring.gpg   sources.list~   sources.list.save  trusted.gpg
> apt.conf.d  sources.list  sources.list.d  trustdb.gpg        trusted.gpg~
> btth at SblzUb:/etc/apt$ ls sources.list.d
> 
> [That got no list, despite nano having just assured me sources.list.d was
> a directory, but just the prompt back. This seems *very* strange ...]
> 
> btth at SblzUb:/etc/apt$ nano -w sources.list.d
> 
_Either_ /etc/apt/sources.list (a file) or _at least one_ file
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ are required (and both may be present).  The
current tendency is to put separate files for each repository
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ but your system may only have the single file
in /etc/apt/sources.list.  In either case:

# grep -r universe /etc/apt/sources.list*

will tell you which files contain a source for universe (note only files
named *.list in the sources.list.d directory are used - there could be
backup files in there).
-- 
derek