Published at LXer:

Some Ubuntu fans out there may remember Automatix, a tool for Ubuntu that allowed easy access to many popular non-free applications and commonly-used audio and video codecs. It debuted a few years ago, and got negative reviews from Ubuntu developers and experienced users due to the risk of breaking dependencies, but it offered an easy solution for beginners who weren't familiar with the way deb packages worked. Automatix was discontinued in March, when its developers moved on to other projects. Now Ultamatix hopes to continue where Automatix left off.

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Anybody who uses this junk does not deserve to be called a "Debian User."

Not really. The days of "purity" in distros has long gone. Once a distro has been installed, it's out of the hands of the Debian devs. If this solves one more problem with getting users into a particular distro or Linux in general, then it can't all be bad.

Can't you have them excommunicated or defrocked or burnt at the stake?

If only they'd leave it up to me! The fact is that Automatix was so roundly denounced by Debian folks that it never came close to getting in the Repos. That didn't stop the Ubuntu apologists from claiming it was a Debian program, and lots of Ubuntu losers thought that maybe by using it, they'd actually be able to "configure Debian." Of course 80% of the time it didn't work, and over on the Debian forums, we reamed them out new anusi whenever they were clueless enough to come looking for help there.

I'm sure Ultamatix is just more of the same.

One of the things that attracted me to GNU/Linux is the configuring, compiling, and general messing about, that can or must be done to get a system working. So naturally I'm averse to anything that smacks of too much automation. Too easy = too boring.

spoken like a true slackware user

...or Debianite.

Thanks. Now that I've got rid of XP, I'm seriously considering dual-booting Slackware with Debian testing. And I would still have room for distro-hopping to find a third resident on my HDD - perhaps Arch, Gentoo, LFS, or maybe one of the BSDs.
At the moment I'm dual-bootng with Ubuntu (sorry for the expletive, rickh) 8.04, a special edition off a DVD given away by Linux Format, with KDE and lots of other stuff included. It's good, for anyone who likes the out-of-the-box easy option - but not my cup of tea.

This is a good time to go for Debian Unstable (Sid). Testing (Lenny) is currently frozen for debugging prior to it's release as Stable in the next 2-6 months. Lots of people don't realize that the Testing freeze really slows down activity in Unstable as well. Normally programs move into Unstable with the hope that they'll be in Testing within 10 days. That's out the window now and most of the Sid activity is programs from Lenny being debugged.

This is a very boring time for regular Sid users like myself. We have to dabble in Experimental projects in order to get something that will break.

Yeah, I was wondering about that, with Lenny being on the verge of going stable. Would it be best to install Lenny from a netinstall CD, edit the sources.list to read unstable, then run aptitude update, then aptitude dist-upgrade?

Yep. Only issue there is the meaning of "on the verge of going stable." The move to Stable comes "when it's ready," and when that will be is pretty unpredictable.

I'll get Lenny downloaded and burnt, evict Ubuntu, and then...Hello, Sid!

Don't just take the default installation. You'll wind up with lots of garbage you don't want. Skim this.

Got it burnt to CD. I'll do the install tomorrow when I'm 100% alert - only about 85% at the moment. Just wondering whether to stick with testing, as I'm still a relative newbie. If I replace Lenny with testing in the sources.list, then when Lenny goes stable I will still be using testing - right?
Nowthen, when are you going to try Slackware?