Savage Popcorn

A little over a week ago, and after hesitating over Linux for some time, I finally took the plunge and installed Ubuntu. It helped, I have to admit, that the install disk allows you to boot your PC from the CD which allows you to play around with it – and check that you can still connect to the internet, and do other vital tasks.

It all went remarkably smoothly and, although I did sign up to the support forums, I’ve found myself asking far fewer questions that I thought I would.

One of the nicest things about Ubuntu is the application manager. If you to install – or remove – an application, you click on a button and off it goes, finds what you need and comes back with a list of options. You select the one you want and… You’re done. No waiting, no rebooting, no cleaning up unwanted icons, your software is installed and ready to use.

This is why I was more than a little amused at this post (via), which describes – in lots of unnecessary detail – how to install MySQL on Ubuntu.

Run Synaptic Package Manager. Click Search and type mysql server. Select the mysql-server-5.0 package. A dialog will pop up saying that installing the MySQL Server package requires installing a bunch of other packages too. See how it did that? It’s called dependency management, and it’s built into all modern Linux distributions. Computers are smart like that. Click Apply and Ubuntu will download, extract, and install everything for you. Along the way it will ask you to enter a password for the MySQL “root” user. You should do that. Blank passwords are bad, mmkay?

Anyway, that’s enough geekiness for one day. Here’s a film

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