Sam Danielson

The best way to destroy an Ubuntu installation is to follow various guides on the Internet that require you to drastically change /etc/apt/sources.list, then at any time run apt-get upgrade or worse yet, dist-upgrade. Flaky sources lead to a flaky installation and my favorite is watching connections time out with apt-get update. On top of all that, when it becomes necessary to revert to more stable sources I wind up with a bunch of broken packages with no way to fix them. Well, no way except uninstalling everything and then reinstalling. Of course the reinstalling is fraught with peril because of all the broken packages.

It all started when I become enamored with installing compiz. I basically made a deal with the devil and followed a guide (which I can no longer find). When that didn’t work I signed on the dotted line with Satan’s quill and ran a script (which I can no longer find) that ‘updated’ my sources.list, xorg.conf, display manger configurations, installed Windows codecs, sound drivers, and you name it, to make Ubuntu more usable as a general purpose desktop. It sort of worked.

I can’t remember the details but it was sort of like this.

bash# sudo ./pimp-ubuntu-and-use-shotgun-to-untie-shoes.sh
Sign deal with devil [Y|n]? Y

In trying to fix this at 3:00am I royally screwed up and pasted in the edgy sources with dapper installed. That, like the upgrade that followed, is user-error. “Wow”, I thought, “Look at all this stuff getting fixed! I gave up when g++ could not be reinstalled due to three dependency issues, and that’s just the tip of the is-not-going-to-be-installed iceberg. Never again, I say again.

Ubuntu is good. I plan to stick with this guide from now on. It’s the only one I still trust. If only I were a guru. . .