Medibuntu RIP

[Yogi]

I have not made much use of the output from the Medibuntu Project, but at the recommendation of a good friend I have been installing it and all it's repositories on my Ubuntu Linux operating systems for the past 4 years. I've had no problems with any of the codecs in that time and can say I'm well pleased with whatever it is they had to offer.

Today I ran Synaptic and the Medibuntu repositories would not load from therein. Apparently the project has been killed since 13 October, 2013 and the repositories no longer offer updates. It really has not affected me much at all, but I suspect that at least one of my dedicated followers might be interested in what I found during my extensive research into obscure topics. There are instructions on how to purge your system of all traces of Medibuntu, for Ubuntu at least. You can find them here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/356794/t ... o-i-do-now

AS AN ASIDE I will say that I learned something new during my Medibuntu purging experiences. The linked article shows how to do it using Aptitude instead of apt-get. For some reason I've been going through life thinking they are one and the same package managers. But, they are not. In the case at hand, Aptitude is the preferred manager to use in cleaning up your system. Who would have thunk?

[Kellemora]

Hi Yogi

Yes, they are two different programs. Got me messed up more than once too.

I have not used Ubuntu since they dropped 8.04.
I tried 10.04 and 12.04 both. Then returned to using 8.04 until it died.
I wanted to go with Linux Mint, but never could get it to install properly.
That's when it hit me, if Ubuntu is Debian with bells and whistles added.
And Mint is Debian with their bells and whistles added.
And I'm not to fond of bells and whistles to start with.
If Debian is good enough for them to base their Distro on, then Debian must be the best.
Been running Debian ever since.
It is NOT turn-key by any stretch of the imagination, and I did many things wrong.
But eventually I got everything humming exactly the way I wanted it to.

Back when I used my frau's old computer to replace my File Server that died.
I tried Edubuntu, thinking that was the best option to go.
However, to run a server as a REAL File Server, would take much more power and memory than that old machine had.
What I now call my File Server, is simply a computer with External HD's connected to it. Data File Server, NOT programs file serving. KISS!
And I'm even drifting away from doing things that way.
Mainly because programs like RSync do not work across a LAN.
Which don't make sense, since any computer on a LAN appears as a File on your Own Computer.
I do have a similar program that mirrors my External HD, across the LAN to the External HD connected to the computer in the house. And then at 3am it copies changed files to an External connected to one of my brothers computers in St. Louis.
And I'm making more use of places like DropBox for things I work on daily.

Although I though Ubuntu was the greatest since melted butter, why they ruined what they had, still makes no sense to me.

When you got a good thing, you don't abandon it for something else. You build upon that success!
Add to and update, not wipe the slate clean and start over every couple of years. Dumb.
Ubuntu 8.04 is what brought me back to the world of Linux, and 10.04 almost ran me right back to Windoze.
12.04 would have made me give up on Linux, had I not found and began using Debian.

TTUL
Gary

[kg]

Those instructions are fine if all you have on your computer is Medibuntu, and you want to uninstall only the Medibuntu packages, leaving the underlying OS intact. That's not the way I fly, though, personally.

I ran across the same problem a while back. I had the Medibuntu version based on 10.04, and 10.04 went out of support an even further while back. I needed Medibuntu due to some of my audio and video projects, so I downloaded and installed it.

The reason I already knew about this procedure is because of my older desktop. It won't boot to a USB flash drive, and I didn't have a DVD drive in a position to boot from, so I was forced to burn an Ubuntu installation CD, install it, then upgrade the installation to Medibuntu...basically the reverse of the instructions at your link.

Back to uninstalling Medibuntu: Thing is, not one of my computers has only one OS installed, and I'm talking Linux OSes. Medibuntu never had control of the GRUB bootloader, since I only booted into it upon need, so getting rid of Medibuntu was greatly simplified. I merely copied all critical data to another location, then deleted Medibuntu's partitions.

Some might think me a bit off, having several Linux distributions installed on my computers, but there's generally a method to my madness. KISS...I like simple! :mrgreen:

[Yogi]

It's not odd at all to have more than one OS installed on a machine. Both my laptop and my desktop have multiple OS's installed. The multi-boot is accomplished in different ways on the lappie vs the desktop. The laptop has a single hard drive with multiple partitions, each with some version of Linux (4 at last count). Each partition has Grub installed based on whatever the particular distribution is wont to do. However, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is my default OS on the laptop and the Grub installed there is also written to the MBR. Thus each OS can boot independently if something should go haywire with the LTS system and/or the MBR.

The desktop has Windows 7 as the default OS. I also have Vista Business installed on a separate hard drive. There is a third hard drive to handle all the Linux distros I care to put there. Given that Grub and Linux in general is so intrusive I did not want to risk putting them all on the same drive with multiple partitions. BIOS is set to boot from the drive with Windows 7 on it, and the boot loader there sees the two Windows drives but not the Linux one. If I want to boot into Linux pressing F11 will bring up a choice of hard drives from which I can boot. Grub is on the Linux drive and poking it's nose into the Windows drives, but I never boot into Windows from the naughty Linux environment.

In addition to all the above, Windows 7 is also the host for any number of virtual machines of the Linux variety, depending on what I'm playing with at the moment. Typically it's the latest version of Ubuntu, which today is 13.10 - the best yet as far as I'm concerned. The reason for virtual machines is security. I do some financial transactions on line, but never from the Windows environment directly. I fire up the current Linux VM and do business from within that box. Windows 7 thus acts as a firewall for the sensitive transactions I do in the Linux box. I think the desktop is pretty well protected, and hope that the financial institutions are doing a good job with SSL and whatever encryption they claim to be using. So far, no problems with OS's or finances.

As far as I know, Medibuntu was part of Ubuntu. Removing it was no more of a hassle than removing any other application. The only problem was that the repositories could not be read. That made sense since the project has been terminated. So, no more Medibuntu on any of my machines and they all still work fabulously. I posted this more as an alert to Glenn because he is the one who helped me with Medibuntu many eons ago. I figured he would know how to take care of it, but might not be aware that there was a funeral. :mrgreen: