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I went to grab autotools so I could play in the source tree of a rather popular open source project. From their “Write Code” page:

Building is straight forward and familiar if you’ve ever built software on Linux before. We use the standard autotools suite for our build environment.

“So hey, I’ll go just apt-get install autotools! That’ll work!”

<chris@zwei> ~$ sudo apt-get install autotools
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package autotools

“That’s not great. However, I can just open up Synaptic and search for “autotools”, and it’ll point me at the packages I want!”

Searching brings up autotools-dev, and a few other packages, which aren’t what I want. Crap.

*google*

Oh, so I need libtool, automake, and autoconf to install Autotools?

*install*

Oh, look, I still need intltoolize. I bet Synaptic can find the package name if I search for that!

No?

Okay, I’ll try running intltoolize in a shell and the magic stuff ubuntu has will find it for me!

$ intltoolize
The program 'intltoolize' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install intltool
bash: intltoolize: command not found

Amazing!

Of course I have something called intltool-debian installed, but that’s obviously useless for what I want to do. I’ll install intltool.

Hey, it actually runs now! Not entirely, as there’s still some autoconf voodoo I need to deal with.

Conclusions:

• Synaptic is both useless, in that it can’t find what package an executable name is in,  and annoying, because it grabs the dpkg lock the second it starts up so I can’t search with it and use apt-get to actually install things. This wouldn’t be a problem if Synaptic didn’t clear my search results every single time I install something.
• Ubuntu’s package repositories are both comprehensive and uselessly grouped around the smallest packages imaginable. This makes task-oriented software installation much harder than it should be.
• Whatever magic powers my shell telling me what package to install in order to get an app I don’t have when I try and run it is way more useful than Synaptic ever was.
• Autotools might just be evil.
• This needs to be much clearer and easier than it is now.

Last June (on the 1st by my timestamps) I took some pictures with my camera in panorama mode. Then I forgot about them for a good seven months. Today, I remembered them and tried to make something out of their existence.

I started out with remembering that hugin looked like a pretty slick application last time I saw anything about it. It is indeed slick, as about 5 minutes after I apt-get installed it I had the makings of a decent panorama picture of Athens.

The resulting image was down right fantastic.

There are a few eyesores with the seams, missing corners (because I really wanted to include the Greek flag), and the like so I gave it a bit of time with The Gimp to get it in an acceptable, though imperfect, state. I’m not as proficient with image manipulation as I wish I were.

Sadly, my other attempt at creating a panorama today (of a beach on Ios) did not go nearly as well. I’m not really sure why.