Gentoo works perfectly well as a desktop operating system, I have Sabayon Linux which is based on Gentoo and would be good, as long as the Network manager works just as well as it does in Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Wicd is not as good as Networkmanager when it comes to using Wireless Broadband. I need to get another Wireless Broadband dongle, my last one broke and I am using the town library Internet as I write this, I am updating from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10, I edited the /etc/apt/sources.lst and replaced all instances of lucid to maverick and typed sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and I can upgrade to Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 that way. Sure it takes a long time downloading more than 323 megabytes of packages, but it is worth the effort, and better than downloading a 700MB CD and installing that then downloading about 400MB of updates. I stand by this method. I wish you could upgrade from the Ubuntu CD’s from Lucid to Maverick, but you cannot. That is stupid, you could do an upgrade from XP to Vista or Windows 7, and keep the old data in the Windows.Old folder, why can’t you do that in Ubuntu? Unless you have a separate /home partition and you can re-install the newer version of Ubuntu and keep your user data. I used to do that a lot, you keep all of your user data and settings and just install a different Linux distribution and tell it to mount the partition as /home. That is a pretty foolproof way to do it, but then you lose all of the extra software you have installed and an upgrade could see what you have installed and upgrade it to the latest versions.
Canonical are you listening? You need to get with the times and see how things should be done, and if the upgrade goes wrong, ie a power failure, then you should be able to recover from that and get it finished. I guess they might go this way in the future, and put in place some kind of system to handle updating. I know they used to pop up a notification where you were prompted to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu, I prefer to do it with the command line as I am used to performing tasks that way.
The Linux flash plugin sure is linked with a lot of stuff as a lot of Linux stuff is. But it is interesting to look at this sort of thing and if you are writing a program, it would be interesting to try and reduce the amount of libraries your executable is linked to.
shoggoth@shoggoth:~$ ldd /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so linux-gate.so.1 => (0x00c36000) libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00110000) libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x007fb000) libXt.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x00444000) libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x0022d000) libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x002a3000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0x002d3000) librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0x009bd000) libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x1e514000) libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x002ec000) libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0x00382000) libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0x0039e000) libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0x003c5000) libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0x003df000) libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 (0x00497000) libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x003eb000) libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x00511000) libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x0042e000) libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x00550000) libssl3.so => /usr/lib/libssl3.so (0x0087b000) libsmime3.so => /usr/lib/libsmime3.so (0x008c3000) libnss3.so => /usr/lib/libnss3.so (0x0061a000) libplds4.so => /usr/lib/libplds4.so (0x00a49000) libplc4.so => /usr/lib/libplc4.so (0x0098e000) libnspr4.so => /usr/lib/libnspr4.so (0x0072e000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0x007b2000) libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0x00763000) libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0x00a4d000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x009e4000) libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0x00789000) libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x00433000) libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x007b6000) libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x007cf000) libexpat.so.1 => /lib/libexpat.so.1 (0x0080b000) libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x007a3000) libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x0043c000) libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x007e4000) libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x007f2000) libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x00832000) libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcomposite.so.1 (0x00440000) libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXdamage.so.1 (0x007ad000) libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x00959000) libgio-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0 (0x09e46000) libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0x0083f000) libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpixman-1.so.0 (0x008e9000) libdirectfb-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libdirectfb-1.2.so.0 (0x00ba7000) libfusion-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libfusion-1.2.so.0 (0x00845000) libdirect-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libdirect-1.2.so.0 (0x0084f000) libpng12.so.0 => /lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x0095f000) libxcb-render-util.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-render-util.so.0 (0x00865000) libxcb-render.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-render.so.0 (0x0086a000) libpcre.so.3 => /lib/libpcre.so.3 (0x00a01000) libnssutil3.so => /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so (0x00993000) libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x00c23000) libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00872000) libuuid.so.1 => /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0x008ad000) libresolv.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libresolv.so.2 (0x00943000) libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0x009c6000) shoggoth@shoggoth:~$ |
My little ping app is not linked to too much in comparison is it?
shoggoth@shoggoth:~/Documents$ ldd ./pingme linux-gate.so.1 => (0x0034b000) libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0x00de0000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x0018c000) |