It’s been at least 4 hours since my last post about Linux, so it’s time to relate my latest Ubuntu adventures.
I’m well impressed. A few weeks in to using Ubuntu, and everything’s still rosy. Everything still “just works”. Sound, webcams, iPod, automounting, everything that (I’ve learned over the years) is tricky to wrangle under Linux. I particularly like the auto-update feature – Ubuntu tells me when anything I have installed is due for an update, I just click “OK” and it downloads and updates. Almost never any need to reboot of course (just once in a while when updating the kernel).
Take for instance a couple of things I decided to install tonight.
Item 1: Get proper encryption working with email.
Ubuntu comes with Evolution installed as standard, and that’s fine with me. I installed GnuPG and created a key (admittedly, I had to touch the command line to do this, but it was as simple as typing gpg --help and following the simple instructions). Then I went to the account preferences in Evolution and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I had a successful test of signed email to myself.
Item 2: Install Eclipse for C++ development.
This one I was feeling less certain about – Eclipse runs on Java, and Java on a 64-bit architecture is a bit iffy, as evidenced by my Gentoo experience. Or so I thought. I searched for “java” in the package manager and found that it was already installed. I searched for “eclipse” and found it easily, and marked it for install. Half a dozen other required packages were automatically selected too. Click “Apply”, wait a couple of minutes for download and install, and my desktop menu bar has a new item: Applications -> Programming -> Eclipse. Cool. I started it up and wrote “Hello, world” to test it. The log window said it couldn’t run “make”. So I did another package search and discovered that make wasn’t installed. Odd, I thought, but 30 seconds later, it was no longer a problem. And Eclipse was able to compile and debug “Hello, world”. Job done.