Fabrizio Giudici's Blog

Some small quirks in Ubuntu .deb installation

A few days ago I blogged about the way we can now deliver a more robust .deb installation of our application on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. Now that I've released a first non-snapshot .deb package, I ran some more tests and discovered a little quirk.

The good thing is that by just downloading a .deb file you can automatically invoke the package installer (and this is the default choice).

If for some reasons there's not the Sun Java version you need, and "multiverse" is not enabled, you get a good error message. It's better to block the installation here instead of going on and having your application to malfunction, as in this way it's clear that there's a missing resource problem.

If you have the "multiverse" already enabled, the installer is so smart to figure out what you need - it will be automatically downloaded and installed. The user can optionally look at the details before going on.

And now the small-but-annoying problem. I noted that the installer progress bar "installing dependencies" got stuck around the middle. I first thought there was a temporary connection problem, but as it didn't resume I opened the "Terminal" tab. Aaargh.... The licensing stuff! You have to go to the bottom of the page and manually insert "y" and press return. I hope that Sun and Ubuntu will be soon able to get rid of this. In the meantime, I strongly suggest you give this hint in the installation notes of your application.

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