Installing additional software packages...

[skeptic]

Perhaps I'm going blind or braindead, but I can't find the answer to this.  I have read that linuxMCE uses special repositories for apt-get and that mixing packages from other sources can mess linuxMCE up.  I also saw a message during install that linuxMCE modified the repositories or some such thing to protect against this.  I need to install additional packages so I did an apt-get of synaptic (I'm new to ubuntu/kubuntu/linuxMCE).  Before I screw things up, am I safe to install whatever I want as long as I don't manually edit anything in /etc/apt?  I took a quick look at sources.list and it appears that along with linuxmce.com/ubuntu/ there are a number of generic ubuntu sources listed:

deb file:/usr/pluto/deb-cache/ ./
deb http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu/ feisty  main restricted multiverse universe
deb http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu/ feisty-security  main restricted multiverse universe
deb http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu/ feisty-updates  main restricted multiverse universe
deb http://linuxmce.com/ubuntu/ ./
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty  multiverse

[Zaerc]

No, you're not safe to install anything at all.  And using synaptic is almost guaranteed to mess your system up.  Better make a backup before you start and only ust apt-get/dpkg to carefully install or remove things.

[skeptic]

No, you're not safe to install anything at all.  And using synaptic is almost guaranteed to mess your system up.  Better make a backup before you start and only ust apt-get/dpkg to carefully install or remove things.

Thanks for the quick reply.  Is there a guide somewhere (that I can't seem to find) that explains this?  If synaptic isn't safe to use, then that pretty much tells me I can't just install whatever via apt-get.  What is the correct method for adding stuff to a linuxMCE box?  Can I setup sources.list in such a way that I'm safe installing whatever is listed?  I don't know how to carefully install/remove things if I don't know what is safe or not.  It was this wiki entry that convinced me to give linuxMCE a try on my desktop: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/I'm_a_Linux_user_already._Should_I_use_LinuxMCE's_distribution

To me this implies that I can use linuxMCE as a normal desktop and as long as I don't go messing around with the wrong mirrors I can do all the normal kubuntu stuff including adding software.