very very old packages

[raffamaiden]

I have installed today kubuntu 12.04. I need texlive and texmaker. I have installed them from the repositories, but then one of mine tex source file didn't get compiled by pdflatex because the siunitx packet was old and did not contain the \decibel definition. Then I got to a terminal and typed latex --version. It turned out I have a 2009 texlive version, which is 3 years old now. I have downloaded it from the official site, which has a program that get all the updated packages installed, and I have also to download texmaker separately, and it turned out that the version in the package manager was old too, since it told me that "an older version is available in the repositories".It turned out that also Octave is in a very old version, I i'm now compiling it from source. Why this packages are very old in the repositories?

[claydoh]

I don't know, I am thinking in this particular case anything newer than 2009 may not have existed in a stable state. From a quick peek, Fedora is using the 2007 version......

[raffamaiden]

I don't know, I am thinking in this particular case anything newer than 2009 may not have existed in a stable state. From a quick peek, Fedora is using the 2007 version......

The octave package in the repository is in version 3.2

raffaele@raffa-PC:~$ sudo aptitude show octave
No current or candidate version found for octave
Package: octave
State: not a real package
Provided by: octave3.2
raffaele@raffa-PC:~$ sudo aptitude show octave3.2
Package: octave3.2
State: not installed
Version: 3.2.4-12

While the official stable package version is 3.6.1. As far as I know every texlive year official release is stable (2009 in the repositories, 2011 officially). Does this happen only for the amd64 version?

[claydoh]

some good news
https://launchpad.net/~texlive-backports/+archive/ppa
someone is backporting the texlive from Quantal back to Precise, very up-to-date I think.

[raffamaiden]

some good news
https://launchpad.net/~texlive-backports/+archive/ppa
someone is backporting the texlive from Quantal back to Precise, very up-to-date I think.

There is also a lunchpad repository with an updated Octave version for Precise, lost the link because I have uninstalled Kubuntu finally because of lack of proper PDF support. Also the official repository reports the updated version only for 12.10. I do not know why they keep a very old version for so long and why they do not update the packages of the current version.

[claydoh]

As I mentioned, Fedora is still at the 2007 iteration.
I do not know what proper pdf support means for you specifically, but that could be the viewer you use- I did my taxes, for example, manually by typing the data into the forms with no troubles. If you mean creation of them, well I imagine that is another kettle of fish.

As to the age of certain software, that is partially because of Ubuntu's strong relationship to Debian. They are known not to ship a thing until it is rock solid. What Ubuntu does is take a snapshot of their unstable branch, and then update a certain set to be more up-to-date. The rest are basically automatically ported over to the Ubuntu repos (in the unsupported Universe component). If no one in the vast user community has an interest in updating/maintaining a thing, it will stay at that version, unfortunately. My guess is the relative ease of getting and installing Texlive from it's developers might be a reason for this? Or a lack of users perhaps?

While I am a tiny bit sad that you had to install an entire OS to rectify these probably easily remedied things, it is soooo cool that doing so is both quite easy and quick to do

[raffamaiden]

Actually I had windows in dual boot with kubuntu. I had just erased the partition and restored the windows's MBR.

The problem is that I must have the latest TexLive package, because I am writing a document that use a feature of the siunitx package that does not compile with the old TexLive version shipped with kubuntu (I have tried). So i have to uninstall it and install from the official site.

Next I had to stuck with the control system toolbox of GNU Octave. I need a feature which was in the latest version of the toolbox but I cannot even install it because it required Octave >= 3.6 while kubuntu ships 3.2. So i had to install mercurial and downloaded the source of octave. Now I had to compile them. I cannot install the build-dep with apt-get of the 3.2 version because, despite the fact that it would work, that would install also the old version of TexLive. So I had to download the dependencies one by one manually (with apt-get of course). Then I also needed a dependency newer than the one shipped (which I could not remember what it was), so I had to compile it too from source. Then I compiled Octave and installed it. Finally I have installed the toolbox, just to found out it was not fully compatible with MATLAB, because the bode() function would return a 1x1 vector while MATLAB a n-n vector, so I had to maintain two versions of my script, one for MATLAB and one for Octave.

Of course, If i had known that someone in launchpaf was shipping it, that would have saved me a lot of time with the recompiling thing.

The problem is not comparing the package version with other Linux distributions, the problem is that Kubuntu (but also the other Linux distributions I have tried including Ubuntu) requires too much long to fix problems, both by yourself and by community (I have issued a bug against KDE and it required more than a year to be fixed, as you can see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264957). I know perfectly you are not paid exc.., the problem is that this loss of time (and fortunately I had knowledge to do this) is unacceptable for normal users, despite the fact that your are not paid.

For PDF support I mean a program that allow me to modify PDF, inserting comments, highlighting text, drawing, exc... Okular do some of this, but won't save back to PDF. I cannot afford PdfStudio.

[GreyGeek]

Well, raffamaiden, one does what they have to do to meet their needs.

I noticed that you seemed to need a lot of tools related to math. Have you tried the Sage math engine? It's a big download but it is totally self-containing and can run on Linux or Windows. It has a ton of tools in it, is being maintained and developed, and is free, including the documentation. It features a Notebook interface similar to Mathematica. The web site is running an engine with online access.

I downloaded version 4.8 on March 2nd, and I see that they are up to 5.0 already. Prof William Stein began development of it in 2004 and now leads a team of PhD grad students who work on it all the time for use in their math and science research. He wrote a very interesting account of how Sage came into existence: http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2009/12...d-me-very.html

[raffamaiden]

Thanks for the suggestion GreyGeek, but I need to use Matlab because my university requires that, although not compulsory currently, it will be in more advanced courses. Plus I need some engineering non-math-strictly-speaking features that I doubt Sage has, and it doesn't have them from a quick view, for example the features that are in the control system toolbox of Matlab. I have understood that Matlab is the de facto standard in engineering. I'm in more need for a serious PDF editor for Linux, which I just cannot find at this time.

[GreyGeek]

Have you tried PDFEdit, which is in the repository?