jHeron wrote:Excuse my ignorance but what is a PPA and what is it for?
Personal Package Archive
Let's talk about Ubuntu, to make this easier.
So Canonical puts out Ubuntu packages that contain applications and/or fixes. MythTV is a package (actually several), OpenSSH is another package, ZoneMinder is a package. So if you're running ubuntu, you can go into the package manager, click on
I WANT ZONEMINDER and through the magic of the internet zoneminder is plopped onto your system, no compiling necessary.
That's all well and good, but by convention (stability), packages tend to freeze at whatever version your application was at when that OS was released. So for ubuntu 12.04, the zoneminder package is (and forever will be) zoneminder 1.25.0 .
So then there are people who
(for reasons) don't want to/can't upgrade to the latest version of ubuntu, but want/need an updated version of zoneminder
and would rather not compile it themselves because they're lazy, don't know how, etc.etc.etc. (In my case, realllly lazy.
)
That's where the PPA comes in. I can tell my system to use iconnor's PPA, which will then replace the official OS zoneminder package. In this case, his PPA has a ready to go package for zoneminder 1.27, saving me a lot of work & hassle downloading and compiling it myself. (Remember: laaaaaazzzzzzy!)
Clear?
