Is there some universal law that forbids

I've never used Allegro. I know vaguely what it is, though. Is it any good?

I personally like it, it's pretty easy to use and I haven't found anything in particular I'm missing (except the aforementioned OpenGL 3.3/4.0 mode).

Well it depends on which Allegro you use. Allegro 5 has a new API, dropped the datafile support in favor of PhysFS, has PNG support by default now, and dropped backwards compatibility as it is a new library this time around. Not sure on the other changes offhand.

I know both, and I like Allegro5 a lot better. I'm actually always referring to 5.x when I don't explicitly say otherwise.

I think I'll take a look at it, then. It does sound quite useful.

Installing it from source now (Ubuntu only provides packages for version 4).

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(Ubuntu only provides packages for version 4).

By far not the only out of date package I'm afraid. Though in 12.04, I found that an unusual number of packages are actually very much up to date (the blender one for instance is only a minor version behind).

The idea is that it's supposed to be more stable if you use out of date packages, but in my experience it's often the case that the version in the repo not only has the same bugs as the upstream version, but it also has all the bugs that the upstream developers fixed in the current version.

I would be using a rolling release distro like Arch, but I can't get my wireless adaptor to work with it - even when I use the same driver that Linux Mint is using. I don't know why.

Well, I usually end up building most things from source. I usually only use the package manager for things that either have rather long development cycles, or things that I just need as dependencies for something else.

I mostly use the package manager; I only build from source when there's a significant difference between the upstream and repo versions.

[edit] The Haiku example (examples/ex_haiku) is a good enough reason to download Allegro.

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I build from source under Ubuntu so I have Allegro 5.02 I think it was. I use binaries in Vista. Sadly I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and it messed everything up so I'm under Vista now. Only thing the Ubuntu forums said was "reinstall" meaning I would have to either set through a backup or lose everything I've worked on.

Only thing the Ubuntu forums said was "reinstall" meaning I would have to either set through a backup or lose everything I've worked on.

Well, backup your data and then restart on a fresh system. It can be quite unnerving, but at least you will get rid of a lot of baggage (well, I don't know about you but during the lifetime of a system I tend to gather lots of packages that I don't really need and don't even remember). Reminds me, gotta reinstall windows too. Have been running that last ver for 2 years already, and it's become horribly slow.

Duthomhas (13282)

Ubuntu/Kubuntu systems seem to get easily hosed on updates. That's why I refuse to use it now.

What would you recommend? I'm trying to fix it now with a USB ISO but not holding my breath.

Arch Linux never breaks from updates because updating the system is the same as updating packages. The only "problems" with Arch are (1) that you have to install almost everything you want by yourself and (2) it's very bleeding-edge, which means that often packages have come straight from the upstream devs with little testing in between.

The first one isn't a problem, firstly because the Wiki walks you through everything, and secondly because the result is that you only have the packages you want, with very few packages that aren't being used.

The second one isn't a problem, because at least when there are bugs they get fixed very quickly, which simply isn't the case with Ubuntu and its derivatives where the same bugs can stay in a package for years despite having been fixed in the upstream version.

Arch is far from perfect, but at least it doesn't pretend to be stable despite having bugs that never get fixed. Also, I think you can choose to use older, more thoroughly tested packages now.

naraku9333 (2163)

@BHXSpecter
Can you be a little more specific as to what the upgrade broke? From my experience must issues can be fixed without reinstall.

@naraku9333: No it had to be a full re-install. Update wouldn't even work in terminal. The login screen went from backgrounds to a black screen with a red x and the password field wasn't showing the dots for the typing. The applications were locking to the menu bar at the top of the screen. Applications were set to one size and couldn't maximize or minimize them. The icons on the left bar were all just grey squares. Only way to reboot it was to go into terminal and type

sudo reboot

so I could boot to Vista and get the 12.04 Ubuntu USB install to re-install it. I lost everything though because I couldn't back anything up because the upgrade button did a half upgrade and then rebooted so it botched the whole system and most the applications wouldn't work, didn't even let me take screenshots of the desktop anymore. Thankfully, my programming code is on my third hard drive, but I did lose my Apache/PHP/MySQL server set up for my testing :(.

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ne555 (10692)

It seems that your desktop manager broke. You could have reinstalled just that (xfce, lxde), and your login manager (xdm, gdm, kdm)
Alternatively you could use just a windows manager (like awesome or ratpoison)

the password field wasn't showing the dots for the typing.

I really hate that. They don't show them in the terminal ¿couldn't be consistent?

Applications were set to one size and couldn't maximize or minimize them

Get a tilling windows manager, you will discover a wonderful world.

$ sudo reboot #¿Is there another way, xP?

Duoas wrote:
Ubuntu/Kubuntu systems seem to get easily hosed on updates

google wrote:
Ubuntu / Kubuntu sistemas se parecen conseguir con facilidad en las actualizaciones de manguera

¿eh? ¿"manguera"? ¿Podría alguien traducirlo, por favor?

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