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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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I saw the GNOME release cycle nearing 2.12 and took the plunge from Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy one day last week. The upgrade was a bit funky, and LyX was not working, so (this being my production machine at work), I promptly reinstalled Hoary.

Today, I (forever optimistic) thought, “perhaps a clean install will be more successful”. Not a painful option, since I had already reinstalled and was running on a virgin, non-customized Ubuntu anyway. The only thing I knew that officially did not work on Breezy yet were the (uninstallaby broken) LyX packages. Too bad, since LyX is my primary tool at work. I thought I’d just build my own LyX, and the latest LyX at that.

The clean install of Breezy was a snap, the new GNOME is awesome (even though Ubuntu have broken it by defaulting to browser mode Nautilus - easy to fix to honor upstream default and to enjoy self more), but sure enough, I could not install LyX. Went to lyx.org to get the source so I could build my own package (surely it must be doable even if the Debian people were too busy with upgrading glibc or X or something in Sid, Sid being truly unstable again).

Not only did I find LyX source. Searching for “debian” in the LyX wiki revealed also a patch for building debian packages on any debian-like system, a clear list of packages to install in order to satisfy LyX’s build environment, and clear, hand-holding build instructions.

Building LyX using the provided debian/rules scipt took ages (you end up building lyx, lyx-common, lyx-xforms and lyx-qt), but I did indeed get the LyX packages with a handlful of readily provided commands. Hail the LyX community.

So yes, Breezy works (for me anyway). I’ll upgrade my home box as well as soon as I can afford a few hours downtime (my network has a client, you know, and she can be quite selective with when and how much downtime is allowed).