How Linux app install leaves one PC expert befuddled
Adrian, you dumbass! At least that was my initial reaction when I read his “Linux’s dirty little secret” column about his struggles with installing applications onto a Linux distro. It was either the Linux Geek rage originating from the knowing that he didn’t Read the Fine Manual (RTFM) or the sheer jealousy of not getting 300+ Talkbacks whenever I post something on ZDNet like the fine Mr. Kingsley-Hughes. But I digress.
You can’t really blame Adrian, though. Adrian is a relatively new Linux user – he comes from the world of Windows, where you double click on a SETUP.EXE icon and minutes later, you’ve got an application installed on your system. With Linux, that’s not the case – different package standards between distributions and lack of standardization in software manifest tools has created a situation where on the most of the major Linux distros, you have Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) files and on others, namely Ubuntu and Debian, you have Debian Archives (.DEB).
To add further complexity into the situation, the RPMs and DEBs used on one distro are not necessarily compatible with the distro on another. And some software doesn’t come in a neat little package format – they come as good ‘ol compressed tarballs (tar.gz or tar.bz2). Case in point, if you want to use the very latest builds of anything from a Open Source project such as Mozilla or OpenOffice.org, and don’t want to wait for your distribution to spoon feed it to you over their network repositories, you need to un-Gzip or un-Bzip2 and tar extract the software to a directory and make manual symbolic links and launch icons on the desktop. Fun, right?
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