 I have used a wide variety of Linux distributions on my desktops and laptops over the years. One of my favorites has always been Ubuntu. I'm actually a pretty big fan of Ubuntu, even though these days I typically run Arch Linux or one of the Arch Linux-based distributions mainly for package availability because Arch of course has the AUR, the Arch User Repository, and that thing is a community repository where anybody can package something up, put it in the AUR, and because of how easy it is to do just that, the AUR has virtually every package known to man in it. It really is one of the defining features of Arch Linux. It is one of the biggest reasons why so many people actually run Arch Linux. Now what if Ubuntu had the AUR? Well, someone has come up with a solution for this problem. They have created a AUR essentially for Ubuntu. It's called Packstall. So Packstall is hosted over on GitHub. You can go check out the source code. It is free and open source software. It is licensed under the GPL version 3 license. And to install Packstall on Ubuntu or on Ubuntu-based system, you can grab a Debian file here, a .deb file. There's a link right here. Or if you want to, you can simply install it using Curl. Now out of the box of Ubuntu proper, I don't think has Curl installed by default, so you have to install Curl first before running the Curl command here to install Packstall. And once you have Packstall installed, the commands for it are very similar to any other package manager like ABT or DNL for even Pac-Man. You have sudo packstall-capital-i for install and then name of program sudo packstall-capital-r for remove name of program sudo packstall-capital-s for doing a search for name of program, etc. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and install this. I'm going to, I've got a virtual machine of Ubuntu 2104 and we're going to go ahead and install Packstall and then to find a list of packages available for Packstall other than the Packstall repository that this guy is maintaining is also maintaining this repository of Packstall-programs and what these are, if I go into packages, these are essentially package builds. If you've ever done a AUR package installation on Arch Linux, you've probably seen a package build. For example, if I click on Neo Fetch, you have neo fetch dot pack script and if I look at it, it looks almost exactly like a Arch Linux package build. Now some people are going to ask, well, why couldn't you just use Arch Linux package builds with Ubuntu? Well, Ubuntu and Arch maintain different package names, right? So not the names of certain programs are different compared to the two different distributions. So you can't just use the Arch AUR and Arch package builds in Ubuntu. So you do have to actually build something new. So let me switch over to my VM here of Ubuntu 2104 Hursuit Hippo. Of course, this is the absolute latest version of Ubuntu and I'm going to open up a terminal and let me zoom in so you can see the commands. Now I could grab the dead pack and install Packstall through the Debian package or I could use the curl command. I'm going to go ahead and just use the curl command. I've already got curl installed inside this VM. Of course, we need root privileges to install or remove software. And yeah, that was a very quick installation. And now that we've got Packstall installed, what I need to do is actually install something. Let's do a sudo packstall- I'm going to do dash capital S. Let's search for a package. Now there was only like six or seven packages currently packaged for Packstall. I remember NeoFetch was one. And let's just do a search. It says NeoFetch is available. Do you want to view the pack script so we can actually view the package build? And it says failed writing body. So it looks like that is broke. Now this is brand new stuff here. This Packstall thing, it says there's essentially beta software. So if there are some errors, I can't really fault it, still early days for it. Let's actually just try to install NeoFetch. We know it's there in the repositories. I'm going to do a sudo packstall- capital I NeoFetch. Do we want to view the pack script at first? Sure. And that actually works. Doing the search and then viewing the pack script didn't work. But viewing the pack script when you're trying to install does work. Although the installation itself does not work. It says sudo stow command not found. So this is a dependency issue. Packstall probably should install this as a dependency when you install it. But I guess for some reason it did not install this particular program here, which is stow. That's GNU stow. What that is? It's a semlinking program. I'm assuming that's how it's handling some of these packages at semlinking, for example, NeoFetch when it installs it to some place on the file system. So what I'm going to do is, since that's a dependency, let's do a sudo apt install stow and see if that corrects the problem. And we'll wait for stow to install. And now that stow is installed. Let's once again sudo packstall- capital I NeoFetch. And see this time if the installation works, I'll decline viewing the package build this time. And it says installing semlinking files. It looks like everything worked. Let's actually see if NeoFetch launches when I run it. Yeah, so we just installed NeoFetch through packstall, which is essentially an AUR clone for Ubuntu and Ubuntu based systems. Now to remove software, you would just run the same command sudo packstall- instead of I for install, capital R for remove NeoFetch would uninstall it. And just to verify that NeoFetch is uninstalled, let me try to run it. And yeah, NeoFetch no such file or directory. Now currently, because it's brand new, not a lot of people know about packstall yet, which is one of the reasons I'm making this video because I think Ubuntu desperately needs this. I really think Ubuntu these days is losing ground to distributions like Arch Linux and the various arch-based distributions like Manjaro, Endeavor, Arco. It's because they have all the packages, right? They have the AUR where Ubuntu really doesn't have anything remotely close to the AUR. Packstall kind of changes the game a little bit. And it's very easy to create these simple pack scripts. These package builds, the creator of packstall, he's already packaged up eight things for demo purposes. Packaged up the adapted GTK theme, GNOME tweaks, CaveVantom, NEMO, the file manager, NeoFetch, which we just saw, ST-LukeSmith, that's LukeSmith's build of the ST Terminal Stellarium, which I've never played with, but I think it's an astronomy program. And of course, he packaged Vim, which Ubuntu actually doesn't install Vim out of the box either. So it would actually be kind of cool to see if Vim installs correctly. So I'm going to do a sudo packstall-capital-ivim. Vim is a more substantial program than NeoFetch. We can review it, make sure that it's not going to do anything malicious. If everything in the package build looks okay, which it does, cue to quit out of reviewing the pack script. And now, of course, it's installing Vim. Vim may take a few minutes to install. It's again, it's a more substantial program where NeoFetch is basically just a bash script. Actually did not install correctly because STO, Error, the STO Directory User Source Packstall, does not contain the package Vim. So Vim actually did not install correctly. That's what I was afraid of, because I knew Vim was going to be a little bit more involved as far as building it. Looking at the errors here, it's probably, again, a dependency issue. It says you need to install a terminal library, for example, incurses. On Linux, that would typically be lib incurses-dev. Well, we could actually try that and see if it fixes the problem. So let's install those with apps. So I'm going to do a sudo apt install. And then let's see if that's actually the name of the package here in Ubuntu. It may or may not be. So lib incurses-dev is the name of the package. And now that we've got that installed, let me actually try to install Vim one more time. I'll decline reviewing the package build this time. And we're getting a lot more output in the terminal. I actually think it's going to build correctly this time. I think that was the only thing we needed was the lib incurses-dev libraries there. And that took about two minutes to build that. And let's see if Vim actually launches. I'm going to open up the bash RC here in Vim. And of course, Vim runs just fine. So pack stall. I love it. It's great. Like it is, just one of the things I've been saying for years, man, I wish Ubuntu had an AUR. This really solves a major issue. If people jump on board, if people actually start packaging things and actually adding them to the repository here. Now, of course, I did get several errors here playing around with pack stall. We had the dependency issue where GNU Sto was not installed, you know, when you installed pack stall. So that's a dependency, make sure Sto is installed. I also had to include certain dependencies for some of the packages themselves. Because Vim package build probably should list that lib incursus-dev package as a dependency. Maybe I will actually go and try to push a correction to his GitHub to try to fix the problem instead of me just saying it, I should actually correct the package build. And because it's a community repository, I know people are going to complain that, oh, you're going to have all these people put broken junk in pack stall. And you know, you're going to have like Vim, the Vim package build obviously was broken. I had to kind of fix it on the fly. Also, you could have people put malicious stuff in it, you know, people can make the same arguments about the AUR, you know, man, there could be malicious code and some of these programs on the AUR, I get that. But you know what, I don't want to hear it. At some point, sometimes you have to go grab third party packages that are not in your Linux distributions core repositories. That's just the fact. And you know, you just got to make your own decisions and hopefully review the package build. And if you know the person that's actually maintaining that package, hopefully it's somebody that you actually trust. So I know I'm going to get flooded in the comments about people saying the AUR is insecure and pack stall is insecure. You know what, I ain't trying to hear all that. Now, before I go, I want to think a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode, Absi, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Archfitch for 30 Chote, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Polytech, Scott, Steven, Sven, Wes, and Willie, they're the producers of this episode. Without these guys, you wouldn't know about pack stall. You wouldn't know about it. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. I don't have any corporate sponsors and I really appreciate your support. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Now Ubuntu just needs a proper wiki.