Ubuntu

I really like ubuntu in some ways....

In general, Ubuntu seems to pretty much do the trick for me. However, it's clever installation CD tries really* hard to make it a nice process. It does work well, even on the weird hardware device I've been installing it on. It comes with loads of great drivers and so on.

What I really wish it had was a switch that you could throw at install time that said:

Would you like this to be a sensible development machine?

If you click yes, it installs all the standard development tools. So far, I've been spending a lot of town managing to get things like bison, byacc, libcurses (development), zlib, openssl, make, and the like installed.

The real kicker though is that Ubuntu does default to installing gcc. That seems ok, except it boggles comprehension that it only installs that! It's just the C compiler, you can't do anything with it because there is no linker, no libcrt1.o, or anything else that you would need to make gcc actually be useful. Sigh.

Comments

[Christer Edwards]

I don't do a lot of compiling but I generally throw in the 'build-essential' package which includes quite a bit. That might help get things setup for you in a few less steps...