5 Aug 2007

Automatix dangerous to systems running Ubuntu

Matthew Garret, an Ubuntu developer, recently took some time to look through the Automatix utility. For those of you who haven't heard of Automatix, according to the its website
Automatix is a graphical interface for automating the installation of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based Linux operating systems.
source: Automatix wiki

In short, it tries to make simple the job of finding and installing commonly required softwares on Debian-based Linux systems (e.g. Ubuntu). For sometime now there has been a debate on whether this software does more harm that good.

Matthew finally took a look. And he concludes that in its current state, the Automatix package is unsupportable. He also goes on to list the problems he found. For those interested in more details, see this blog post here.

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