When I was sticking to Xubuntu 8.04, one of the things that saved my life was PPAs. A PPA is a Personal Package Archive, hosted on Launchpad. They let me install the latest versions of OpenOffice and Firefox even though the versions that came with my distro were a few versions behind. They are also useful for a ton of things that for whatever reason don’t make it into the official Ubuntu repositories. Once you have added a PPA to your system, installing and update software from it is as seamless as from the official repositories, and the apt-get style of software management is possibly my favourite thing about Ubuntu/Linux.
However pre-9.10, adding a PPA was kinda fiddly – you had to edit certain files, add special keys, blah blah blah. Now in 9.10 (karmic koala) it is super easy. For example, here is how I install the Arduino and Scratch IDEs from their PPAs:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scratch/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arduino-ubuntu-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arduino
sudo apt-get install scratch
I love it!
