Wine, Whine, installs, and the like

[D. Hageman]

On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Steev Johnson wrote:

> 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

Well, if that is what you have to do then that is what you have to do.  I 
recommend that if you think that you are becomming an alcoholic you switch 
to Mac OS.  :-)

> Well, so does Linux.

No.

Depends on the distrobution you run and what the philosphy is.  If you get 
a BSD style distro you will find that you have neat little directories for 
most major pieces of software with the binaries soft linked back into your 
path.  RPM/DEB based distros do spread files around, but if you know how 
to use your package tool you can find the files very easily.

rpm -ql <package>

> 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. 

Well, sounds like you need to write the maintainers of the RPM and let 
them know that their RPMs are broken.

> 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?

Nothing, see above.

> 
> 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.

And why ... because you have run Windows for so long.  It is called 
experience.

> cobol.  If I can't figure this stuff out easily, how is the average
> sysop ever going to be able to deal with this?  

No matter how I answer this question it will be bad.  I will pass ;-)

Have fun!

-- 
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||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
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