emacs and Ubuntu

Well. After a real run around the houses... I'm now back up and running with Fedora Core 7. The final straw with Ubuntu was when I tried to install the Antenna House formatter. The missing files and libraries was ... impressive. Packages are one thing, but object files? I just said enough and started downloading the FC7 DVD. First time I've done that! 2.7Gb. By the time we came back last night it was there, unchecked. We'd been out celebrating the ladies golf team at Elton (EFGC) winning the Cecil Leitch comp for the second year running, so I wasn't going to do anything then. Burned the DVD, SHA1SUM was OK. Twenty minute to install... then 4 hours to update! I then downloaded emacs 22.1 source, configure and make install. No problem.

Antenna House still had a problem installing, but this was helpful. Seems that the missing file, libstdc++.so.5 is provided by compat-libstdc++-33 package. Problem solved.

The neat trick for email (often a problem when migrating) I found, by accident, is that Thunderbird has all its stuff in one directory. On a clean install, this contains a file 'profiles.ini', which might look like

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
#Path=q0wco0u4.default # new
Path=rxafkrtk.default

Note the commented out line? That was there. I picked up the old similarly named directory containing lots of email, copied it into ~/.thunderbird and hey presto, all my old email suddenly appears! Either that is a really smart piece of design, or a stroke of good luck on my part.

Adobe acroread caused problems. this came to the rescue. Thanks Javier. Java's installed but I couldn't get SDM to install. I'll get back to that. So far a good days work. See if I can build the blog and post it now. Yep. No problem. Python 2.5 and Java 6 working together. Then upload using fireftp!