Makes me wonder if Linux will ever be ready for the common desktop, not to mention laptop

[Daniel Kasak]

On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 21:14 -0400, Richard Bronosky wrote:

> I just wonder if the public at large will ever be able to use Linux.

I've set up a number of Ubuntu boxen for family & friends, and they seem
OK with it. We've also got Gentoo running on 75% of desktops here at
work. Perhaps the public at large will never be able to download
multiple packages via git and manually compile and install them, but
that's not the same thing as 'using Linux'.

> So, in order to do what I want with my computer I need to use the
> bleeding edge stuff.  That's fine, but I can't experience any down
> time.  So, I can't blindly install crap, or follow a hodge podge of
> howtos.  I need to know how to get xorg, xrandr, and the Intel drivers
> working

For bleeding-edge stuff, you need to download the sources via 'git'.
See http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/UsingGit:

Also see: http://wiki.x.org/wiki/CompileXserverManually for more
instructions on downloading and compiling X and related stuff.

>  and how to rollback if there are problems.

That gets a bit more tricky. Most packages should 'make uninstall'. It's
a good idea to make a duplicate copy of all the sources you download
from git, and rename the directory to today's date. So in theory, you
could have the following directories:

xserver ( your local copy of the git repository )
xserver_20070608 ( today's source, that you just installed )
xserver_20070601 ( old source that you previously built )

So if today's xserver doesn't work, you should be able to 'make
uninstall' in the xserver_20070608 directory, and then 'make install' in
the xserver_20070601 directory.

However not all packages 'make uninstall'. Personally I only install
stuff via Gentoo's portage, for this very reason ... portage does all
compiling / installing into a sandbox, and then makes a list of all
files it installs into the final destination, so it can then *really*
uninstall things when requested. Otherwise sooner or later you end up
with crap in every remote corner of your filesystem.

Also keep in mind that different versions of the same thing install into
different locations ( DRM modules in the kernel install into a different
location to DRM modules in the git repository ) ... so make sure you
don't have multiple versions of things installed.

It's a bit messy, but most people would not do any of this, and just use
whatever their distribution includes.

> Where can I find this info?

See links above. And if there you find the documentation lacking in any
way, fix it, so the next person has a slightly smoother ride than you :)


--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
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email: dkasak at nusconsulting.com.au
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