awful questions and a rude guy

Story: Get some answers on Ubuntu Linux with this review and interview ...Total Replies: 7
Author Content
gavinb

Jul 07, 2006
8:50 PM EDT
How did this article even qualify to make lxer. Why in the world is this guy even tallking about Ubuntu. He does not even use Firefox. If the biggest problems with Ubuntu are forcing bluetooth and firefox into every install Ubuntu is doing very good. This guy should be reviewing Gentoo type distos only. I have to give credit to the Ubuntu develper for being polite.

Come on lxer guys you can do better.
grouch

Jul 07, 2006
9:54 PM EDT
gavinb:

I was hoping LXer readers would dissect this thing to find out if there are reasonable complaints in it.
jimf

Jul 07, 2006
10:02 PM EDT
Get real gavinb... Here we go blaming the messenger again.
dcparris

Jul 08, 2006
9:21 AM EDT
Here at LXer, we believe our readers are intelligent enough to digest the news and offer their own intelligent, thoughtful commentary on the articles presented.
tuxchick2

Jul 08, 2006
1:29 PM EDT
The article is mostly baseless griping, IMO. In a nutshell, Jaqui is annoyed because Ubuntu does not install and behave in the manner that he prefers. Every distribution installs with packages users don't use or want- so remove them, already. He can have a root password. He can have a different desktop or window manager.

The one valid gripe is over-reaching dependencies. I don't want Bluetooth or PCMCIA on a desktop machine, either. I was able to remove them uneventfully.

But the Samba client is another story:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge libsmbclient smbclient Password: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: kdebase-kio-plugins* kmplayer-konq-plugins* konq-plugins* konqueror* kubuntu-konqueror-shortcuts* libsmbclient* smbclient*

There is no good reason to take Konqueror, the plugins, and the Konqueror shortcuts with it. The great strength of Linux/Unix is its modular architecture, so you have complete control over your system. Basic security says 'don't have stuff on your system you don't need.' So Mr. Waugh's claim of paying close attention to security misses this point.

Since my test system only has Kubuntu, there might be different issues than with Ubuntu.
grouch

Jul 08, 2006
1:59 PM EDT
tuxchick2:

That looks nuts. Reminds me of when GNOME got banned from my computer. It tried to tell me my printer depended on a sound daemon. Haven't had anything gnomish on my computer since.

Did you try it with just:

apt-get remove smbclient --purge

Maybe there was a cascade effect from libsmbclient => kdebase-kio-plugins, and from there it had to take out the rest of konq.
tuxchick2

Jul 08, 2006
2:09 PM EDT
You're right grouch, smbclient goes quietly; it's libsmbclient that wants to take half the system with it.
grouch

Jul 08, 2006
2:52 PM EDT
Heh. Where's my gold star? (I need a bunch of them to cover the scratches received from trying to remove libs instead of just end-use things).

My guess was that the plugins included support for smb stuff and would therefore need libsmbclient. The plugins would either have to include support for smb or there would have to be 2 different kdebase-kio-plugins packages, which would mean everything depending on them would have to split in two, one for kdebase-kio-plugins+smb and kdebase-kio-plugins--smb.

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