Probably stupid question, but

[Liam Proven]

On 27 August 2013 19:33, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:

> Gene, Liam gave you good advice, ~within the Ubuntu sphere of things~.

Thanks.

> Of
> course, olde time Red Hat users expect to install exotic apps straight from
> the vendor.

Yes, it was like that once, but not any more.

Well, it might be on Fedora, but if anyone is daft enough to run an
alpha-test distro, they deserve their suffering.

> But, not all distros keep lib locations and versions the same.

Indeed they do not.

> I'm running 13.04 and the nVidia driver, straight from nVidia, for the first
> time ever just refused to work.

It has documented problems on some recent versions due to missing
kernel headers. I /think/ it was since 12.10 but I could be wrong.

Q.v.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-ringtail-nvidia.html

>  The same could easily happen with adobe.

It could, but graphics drivers are a core system components that
interacts with kernel-level code. (X.11 always runs as root.)

Flash is just a browser plugin. Far less dangerous.

> The only time I would go outside the sphere of Ubuntu packages is if the
> package clearly fails, or cannot be obtained any other way. Which is rarely.

Agreed.

I have in the past used a PPA to run a newer version of the Pidgin
chat client, as the built-in one stopped connecting. It /is/ sometimes
necessary, I'm not denying it.

But the best thing to do is always to try the official way. And that
means finding out how. It means /not/ thinking "hey, I used to know
how to do this, let's see if it still works."

-- 
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