Monday 25 February 2008

Adding the Medibuntu repository

For the final third-party repository to be added, we will add Medibuntu. This popular third-party repository is not affiliated with Ubuntu in any way, but provides many popular software packages (or as they put it, Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions in Ubuntu) including Acrobat Reader (which can also be installed as shown in a previous post), Real Player, Google Earth, and Skype.
Medibuntu has two components to its repository, free and non-free. The free component includes software which, although it is distributed with an open-source license, it is not distributed with Ubuntu because of legal issues in certain countries that prevent it from being freely available worldwide. This includes software such as Amarok and Kaffeine, which are available from the Ubuntu repositories, but with certain functionality removed because of these kinds of legal issues. Medibuntu distributes these with this functionality.
By comparison, non-free includes software that is distributed under a license that restricts how they can be distributed. This includes the likes of Google Earth and Reader.
Anyway, that's the blurb out of the way. How do we add it? Simple. First of all, start your text editor with sudo, like so:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Now add the following line to the end of the document:
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ gutsy free non-free

Save and exit, then enter the following:
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You know the drill from here! Just update your sources:
sudo apt-get update

Now you can install anything you want from Medibuntu. You may notice that if you do an apt-get upgrade, you get new versions of existing software such as Amarok. This is fine - as I said earlier, the versions in the Ubuntu repositories don't necessarily have the full functionality for legal reasons, so this just means it will automatically upgrade to a better version.

1 comment:

Arif Syamsudin Budi Wahyudi said...

thank you for the repository info. help me a lot.