[school-discuss] Installing From Tar

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the responses.

David has a good point in his suggestion that I provide
specifics. Here's a bit of background.

As I've mentioned in this group before, I've been using a
GPL programming language....

http://basic256.org/index_en

....to produce digital art. BASIC-256 is available for
both MS Windows and Linux (in fact, I originally began
using it on a Windows machine). My primary computer
right now is a laptop on which the pre-loaded Windows
died; the Linux distros I've installed on it since have run
fairly well. I intend to keep doing most of my work with
BASIC-256 on this laptop until further notice.

Since BASIC-256 is a fairly obscure app, it's not available
for easy setup in every distro. In the ones where it does
appear, the file in the repository is not always the latest
version. Furthermore, some versions have demonstrated
a few bugs on my particular hardware. Support is less than
perfect, because the central maintainer of BASIC-256 is a
working stiff with a lot of higher priorities and not very
many knowledgeable geeks helping him out.

One place where I did see a recent version of BASIC-256
was in the FreeBSD world. In the hope of making things
easier, I installed PCBSD....

http://www.pcbsd.org/

....but I then discovered that I couldn't get Internet access
at all, and I wasn't inclined to fight through all the possible
causes when I knew I had Linux distros that handled the
web just fine on the same laptop.

The important thing to me is not which distro I run; I've
tried enough of them to know that they all have their various
strengths and weaknesses. What I want is an environment
which gives me an acceptable GUI (I can live with either
Gnome or KDE, and I won't rule out some of the other
choices), a few common apps (a decent browser, LibreOffice,
Abiword, Gimp, some others), and the ability to upgrade the
more obscure apps I use (like BASIC-256) in a way that
is *reliable* (that's the top priority) and doesn't force me to
struggle through some new weird sort of minefield each
time I do an upgrade. If possible, I'd like to have a short
script I can run every time an upgrade is required, with
few (if any) changes to the script each time.

LM mentioned the more geekish distros like Slackware
and Gentoo. Even if they are a bit harder to install up
front, I might be willing to go through the process if the
payoff is an environment with greater reliability and
control down the road.

There's an idea that I want to toss in, since this group is
aimed at education.... It might be useful to make my
situation the basis for a school's class project, presumably
at the level of high school or college undergrad. As the
students worked on ways to give me what I need, they
(and I) would learn more about the details of Linux;
they would also get experience in providing technical
support to an end user. I figure it couldn't hurt.

Anyway, you now have some of the background. I'll
check out the resources that Daniel mentioned. I look
forward to seeing your further comments.

Joel
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