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the_photon
January 7th, 2011, 08:11 AM
Hello all,

Although my overall experience with Ubuntu has been positive in most senses, please pardon me while I blow off a bit of steam, in a polite way.

My question is this: what they h*ll is wrong with Ubuntu in particular and computers in general! Is it just my machine? Does everyone struggle to install programs on Ubuntu the way that I do?

I suppose that what I really mean to say is that I have been a Ubuntu user for about eight months now, and I am constantly finding that "Program X" cannot complete a make install, because "Error 1: Abort source could not locate file /home/name/blahbla. File wtf-apt-get-pseudo.src must not be installed properly." (and no of course that's not a real error message, and yes I'm being a bit facetious.)

After several hours of searching the internet, I find a download for wtf-apt-get-pseudo.src. After another hour of studying a README file, I think I have figured out what is necessary to get wtf-apt-get-pseudo.src to install, and then it won't complete a make file because it can't find some other file -- a fool's errand it seems.

To state some more concrete (and less emotionally slanted) examples, I currently cannot get CUPS, hplip, Tcl/Tk, and a long list of other programs to install (or make install, I suppose) on my Ubuntu machine. I am currently a graduate student in computer science (who seems to be lagging behind in his linux family knowledge -- much of our work is on windows, visual studio, etc.)

I am curious to know if all Ubuntu/Linux users have a long list of programs that should install but won't, and have to have an additional Windows machine like I do just to do normal stuff that should be easy.

Again, forgive the rant, but I am curious if I am the only one who has these difficulties in general with installing anything on my Ubuntu machine. I am currently using Ubuntu release 10.04 (lucid). Suggestions are welcome -- but yes I already own several linux books, and if you want to see my error messages (in the situations above), I might be willing to post them, but a long line of Linux users have already been unable to really fix any of the problems.

the_photon

oldos2er
January 7th, 2011, 06:48 PM
Are you compiling source code (it sounds like it)? Cups and hplip are both in the repositories, which should always be one's first choice for installing software.

Rubi1200
January 7th, 2011, 07:32 PM
Did you install the build-essentials package?


sudo apt-get install build-essentials

More information:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompilingEasyHowTo