I’ve argued in the past that it was on the womb of Linux where the “App Store” model first kicked, not on the iPhone or the iPad or Symbian. However, sometimes in typical Linux’s fashion it was never given the importance it had, yes people argued some distributions were easier than Microsoft Windows because of it (and they were right) but very few seemed to identified this ingenious feature as potentially revolutionary for the entire world. In the long run, this meant that it was not out of our stadium that the ball first hit the head of consumers, it… Continue Reading

We already peeked at APT’s history on our first Linux Inside and took a tour on Netrunner’s default suite of APT’s front ends on Visual Guide: Muon. Today we want to take a look at the back end itself. Using the command line has many advantages,  it’s faster once you the hang of it. The first thing to know is APT needs superuser permissions for some actions, this is a security measure, so before executing some APT command you usually need to invoke sudo Using sudo is really easy, you just put it before any command [app] you want to give… Continue Reading

On our first Linux Inside we not only explained the origin of and what package managers are, we made a very specific case: Linux, hand to hand with APT, was at least a decade ahead of the competition. Such a powerful advantage ought to be exploited. Muon Suite is set of applications designed to deal with APT ranging from a user friendly, and incidentally less powerful, interfaces to advanced interfaces. If any reader is uncertain about what APT is, we recommend reading our previously mentioned: Linux Inside: Package Managers. Muon Software Center As can be seen in the previous screenshot… Continue Reading

In the most popular desktop operating system applications are installed using binaries which contains everything that app needs to run. This approach has many advantages: It’s easy, people just click on it, wait for it, and that’s it. But it also has its share of problems, binaries tend to be big, since they need to contain everything, multiple apps containing the same libraries install a new one every time, and there’s little cross library use beyond what Microsoft provides. Because of its nature, there never was any need for a centralized system, because all binaries contained everything Apps needed, software… Continue Reading