Wine, Whine, installs, and the like

[Steev Johnson]

Ok,

I saw the posts on WINE and I thought about the fact that the only way I
can bear installing software on Linux is to drink some wine first.  Now
before you all get your proverbial underwear all twisted up, let my
state my case.  Evil empires and costs aside, one of the biggest
complaints a sysop has about Windows in all of it derivations is that
when you install something it buries files around the hard drive and
registry like squirrels hiding nuts for winter.  Well, so does Linux.
Let's take for example the MYSQL package as implemented under Trustix,
or any other distribution for that matter.  None of the RPMS really WORK
to get it installed, there is still tons of Mickey mouse to make it work
- if it ever does.  So it is not really "installed" until you hack
around for a few hours, tracking down where it put all the files, and
trying to figure out why safe_mysqld hangs.   What every happened to the
glorious days of DOS when everything was in the same %$&! directory!?
What was wrong with that?

Yes, I understand the shared data and the centralized config can/should
be somewhere else, but this is just a mess!  Whether it gets installed
under /usr/bin or /usr/shared or usr/local or whatever seems to depend
on how someone was feeling that day.  Much like windows.  At least with
windows, I KNOW there are only a couple places other than the app
directory that they are going to dump DLLs and the like.

The reason I point this out is while I am not God's gift to genius, I do
have 20+ years in the industry and a strong background in writing
assembly language device drivers all the way through C, databases, and
cobol.  If I can't figure this stuff out easily, how is the average
sysop ever going to be able to deal with this?

Is there a secret handshake that I am missing?  Or are these
distributions WAY different than I expected?  Trustix, BTW, is quite
interesting to play with, easy to install, and somewhat daunting to make
work doing other than its original intent.

sj

-----------------------------------------
Steve Johnson
Manager of Advancing Technologies
Commercial Lithographing, Inc.