mycroes

There's always time to play

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

ubuntu-desktop meta-package

Sometimes you're looking for something, could be a word, package name or whatever. You're so close, but still you can't remember. That is, until you worked around `the problem' and you suddenly remember what it was. Now I for one had to install ubuntu using an alternative method. I don't know why, but ubuntu (7.10) wouldn't properly boot off the cd. All I got was a busybox shell, not something I'm really happy with. So I decided I'd try some other liveCDs from other distros and because I'm a long-time Gentoo user I decided I'd first see if the Gentoo liveCDs work and when they did I decided to try archLinux. I never used it before or anything, but I remember that archLinux is based on Gentoo... I might very well be wrong, but that seems to has gotten stuck in my brain. So I dled archlinux, it booted fine, was able to run the installer, but couldn't mount the cd, so I dropped archLinux and decided to try to install ubuntu in another way (I wanted the machine to be up and running within a day or so, and wasn't willing to spent some hours doing it the gentoo way). So I found directions to install Ubuntu dapper using debootstrap. Worked quite well for feisty too (yes I know, gutsy is newer, just overlooked it), so I had feisty up and running, but no X or anything. Now I know my way on the terminal, but I wanted to see how well this box would do as a Playstation One emulator. And then I came to the problem I started this post with. I remembered there was some meta-package that would give me gnome and all, so I started searching for gnome metapackages. There was something like gnome-environment or whatever, when I installed it I still had no X. So I installed X (by installing Xorg) and then I noticed an error when I started GDM, stating that it couldn't find the human theme. And as soon as I logged in I remembered; the meta-package is called ubuntu-desktop.