Edward Andrew Robinson

APT-URL is one of my favorite programs. The great thing about it is I can keep a list of programs I like on a website and easily install all the program I like on a new box, or point someone new to Ubuntu to the website with all my favorite programs. The problem is that with the personal package archives, letting users run there own repositories on launchpad, and many great programs using there own repository’s you need to add them to your source.list file before you can use any of those great programs.

My solution, let APT-URL add a repository after giving a warning of course. Is this dangerous, sure it is but we can take a similar approach to this that Firefox does, only let trusted websites add to the source.list file. So on a trusted website like launchpad you would get a message like “launchpad.net is trying to add the following repository” compared to a random website that might say “wiki.earobinson.org is trying to add a repository if this is a trusted website please click yes otherwise click no”. This would add some risk but the benefit to the user is huge. Please support this idea by voting for it at the Ubuntu brainstorm.

I often recommend Ubuntu to people and recommend that they install programs like miro, and geany. Geany comes stock in the Ubuntu repositories and miro has great step-by-step install instruction for beginners, however as I make this post they currently have no official Gutsy support. When I recommend a program to a user I usually send them the command line install command sudo aptitude install geany as well as sending them instructions

Go to System, then Administration, then click Synaptic. From there you can search for geany and you should be able to double click the name then click install and Ubuntu will install geany for you.

In my mind both solutions extremely simple, but then I have been using Linux for a while now and am a computer geek. I was trying to set up ssh the other day for a friend and they where complaining to me about how on Windows they can just click the program the select run, I claimed that you could do the same thing in Ubuntu (with a deb file) but the claim was that the website (repository browser) was ugly, and well I cant really argue with that. Now that Geany is out I can go back to my friend with another solution and if they want to install Inkscape I can just say “here you go“.

The only downside is that currently adding a new repository is disabled, my two cents is that we should give the user a nice large warning then go ahead and add the new repository. Another anoying and easily fixed thing is that I was looking at the Ubuntu wiki for games yesterday and I thought “ohh I’ll add in some apt:// URLs so that users can just click to install games”, but currently the Ubuntu wiki doesn’t support apt:// URLs so I got them working on my own wiki, just to make sure that it was easy and started a list of my favorite applications.

I guess I really have 2 requests:

1. Enable AptUrl to add third party repositories, I’m going to download the code eventually and take a look at this and post a deb file if I make one. But It would be great if someone beet me to it.
2. Add support for apt:// URLs on the Ubuntu wiki.

Oh and thanks for such a great feature.