On Sunday 15 June 2003 03:13 pm, Adrian Golumbovici wrote: > Actually I think he has got a point and everybody misunderstood him. IMHO > he wasn't bashing Mandrake, but merely stating a Linux general problem. > The libraries and dependencies thing is linux is really a big PITA. Each > time I want to install something which is not in my standard distro I have > to go through the pains of hell for searching for dependencies. As far as > urpmi is concerned it does a great job, but since it cannot resolve > dependencies outside the mdk distro, it doesn't help much. I hate Winblows > and still dream of the day when I could totally switch to linux, but linux > is not making things very easy for us who want to switch to it. In winblows > I don't have to give a rats ass about dependencies. Most programs come with > the needed library statically binded or depends on libraries which are > already in the distros of about 5 major types of winblows on the use at > this time.
<snip> My point EXACTLY - thank you, Adrian. You see - unlike many of you on this list, I am NOT a Linux guru - I am a network geek, by all means, and I really got a kick out of Linux the first time I discovered it can run tcpdump (1993-4-5?!? ... can't even remember). I LOVE Linux, but I never did development on its platform, and the only time I really touched *nix programming was in school, for Tannenbaum's Minix (awesome!) OS design class. And ever since, I have looked toward Linux as my platform of choice for TOOLS for networking and security ... but in the last couple of years it became more and more bloated, trying to gain a market it has NO CHANCE of conquering (desktop), moving in the direction of Windows, with light-years behind it in regards to ease of use. And you know what? It SHALL NOT be easy to use (as in GUI/KDE/Gnome-like - at least not as a unique purpose! ... perhaps it can come as a by-product, when everything is stable enough to be worth looking in that direction). And all this with the price of incompatibility with the things supposed to be used for ... I have a group I am in charge with, of very sharp network gurus, whom I am trying to continuously push toward Linux, while my job keeps me more and more away from this, more into responsibilities of what I call "pie-chart creation" :( ... but even this bias toward Linux as a platform comes with a huge price: countless hours spent on trying to make things work under Linux (ntop, nagios, snort, mrtg, rancid, etc.), to the point when the time*resources spent cannot justify anymore the *assumed" costless choice of running such things on Linux. Many times I have to humbly recognize my failure when being asked by the CEO: why didn't you buy X, or Y, or Z, pay $$$ on MS W2K and MS SQL, and get YOUR JOB (networking and security!!) done? And many times I have no answer ... Sorry for the off-topic comments above ... all I was hoping was to find the "recipe" for libraries issues in Linux, primarily for Mandrake. I got some good advices, and I got some new ideas to try, but mostly I got "yes, this and that are weird". Thank you all for helping. I sure hope things will get back to where I met Linux first time: Yggdrasil's distro ... what a hell of a time we had together, then ;) ... while trying to resolve my MDK issues ... and wondering if they are really only mine?!? Thx, Stef
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