APT Sources Manager

[emorrp1]

foxoman, the Software Sources app is being fixed for Helena. It's really not very difficult to use Synaptic > Settings > Repositories once you know of its existance. It's even easier to use the command line

[linuxviolin]

Another quite easy way is to open as root with a text editor like Gedit the file sources.list and just copy and paste the line(s) about the repo(s)... Simple, it's like open and modify a text you wrote yourself. Everybody can do that, even for a newbie this should not very difficult, I guess...

I don't think we need a "new" GUI, one more...

[emorrp1]

True, just one of the reasons Software Sources is being brought back for helena. Taking the wine page as an example (http://www.winehq.org/download/deb), you add apt keys using the following (adjust to correct url): wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

[emorrp1]

good find steve, I thought there was an alternative method somewhere, but couldn't remember it. However, the keyserver method you mention only works if the maintainer has put their key on ubuntu's keyserver.

[linuxviolin]

All this about adding a key is very good but when you add a repo it's not absolutely necessary to add the key for it. e.g. I added the repo for opera and the repo for emesene (at the time) and I have never added the keys! The only difference is without the key Synaptic you give a message to say you the package is not authenticated and it asks you if you want to install it anyway. Not really a big problem...

And when you pick up the address of the repo on a web site for example, you have also normally/often ((ok not always but... often ) the key and the procedure to add it.

P.S.= I don't say you have never to add a key, but just it's not absolutely necessary

[optimize me]

For someone like me or you it's very easy to use command line or Repositories Editor from synaptic , but if you ask any newbie it will be very difficult for him to do so .!

I remember in my n00b days - sources.list was the very first configuration file I ever edited by hand. It was a UF post, and I forget what the actual repository was or even why I was installing something from a 3rd party repo. Even though it was presented in the standard manner (e.g., open a terminal and paste the following command, paste these lines into sources.list, update, upgrade, install...) I remember being so nervous about breaking something... It all turned out well in the end, and I found myself a little wiser for the experience.

Just a couple days ago, somebody was asking about installing pidgin. I remember posting up a quick how-to in the previously mentioned manner (sudo nano sources.list, add these lines, update, install..) and somebody came back and gave me a mild chastisement for suggesting somebody edit their sources.list in that manner - that it might not be n00b friendly.

Well, OK, I guess I understand the point made. On the other side of that, my instructions were clear and concise. Given the time and resources, I could train a chimp to edit sources.list with nano.

Sure, noobs should be coddled to a certain extent, but I don't think people should be worrying about writing a GUI app for every damn thing that somebody somewhere might want to modify at some point in time. Then we just become Windows.

I don't care what anyone says, there's no way to avoid a command line forever in Linux. Eventually, you're going to have to open one up and at least paste in commands. People might as well get used to it.