In one of my classes we are getting to play with wonderful pieces of technology called "SMART Boards." I'm been using Linux for some time now and I'm going to be honest, when I heard this I thought to myself "Well there is one more thing I'll have to run through Crossover or boot up the VM to use."

As such I was pleasantly surprised when I navigated my way to SMART's website and discovered a fully cross-platform application set for interacting with the SMART board. When I clicked through to the download page for the latest version of the SMART software I found a single package download link for Linux. Again being a cynic at heart I was expecting to have to go through something like this again once I opened that tar.gz package. After the 22megish file archive finished downloading, I extracted the contents and much to my surprise I was greeted by a single file with the extension ".package" Curious, I had never seen a file with this extension before. Being a "jump in with both feet first" type person when it comes to technology I gave the file a double click, doing so caused Ubuntu to greet me with a message I had seen many times before: "The contents of this file appear to be an executable text file what would you like to do?" I went ahead and selected "run contents in terminal".

What proceeded to run on my computer was quite possibly the most seamless non-distro specific package installation I have ever experienced. While the installer worked it's magik I did a quick search on the Linux Answer Machine as to what exactly this ".package" file was. I found it was created by a packaging system called "Autopackage"

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