Automatix

[dal]

Not really a Mint specific question...I happen to be a user of Truecrypt and noticed on the Mint Wiki that it referred to using Automatix to do the install. I had already searched with Synaptic and Truecrypt hadn't shown in the repositories. I can understand using Automatix to install something that isn't in the repositories, but I'm a little confused as to why you would use it to install something that can be installed via Synaptic. I'm not familiar with Automatix and was just looking for some clarity, since I have seen it mentioned in the forums here.

~regards

Dal

[scorp123]

For some patent and/or copyright reasons not all stuff is directly available in the repos. E.g. some DVD codecs, some peer-to-peer software, and lots of proprietary stuff will not and cannot ever be available via a distro's official repo. But then again those patents and copyrights are not valid everywhere; particularly here in Europe most US software patents are either moot or not valid. So that's why the creators of various distributions (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, maybe Mint too?) don't put all those "goodies" which happen to have problematic licensing issues directly into their repos; instead the user would be forced to download e.g. all those goodies manually. The people who wrote and maintain "Automatix" then obviously thought: "Manually!? How unfriendly ... " and hence wrote their program, so you don't need to download those "problematic" apps yourself -- "Automatix" will do it for you.

So obviously "Automatix" and the stuff it offers to install might be illegal in your area, especially in the US of A, whereas in most European countries you don't need to worry and can install away anything "Automatix" has to offer.

[dal]

Thanks for the clarification, Scorp. I guess it could be helpful when having dependency issues when installing something manually, I have actually seen that with Truecrypt when doing a manual install.