On Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:23:59 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> ...er, yeah. Nice in theory. Not so great in practice. ;-) Between
>>> trying to get Linux to work properly, fiddling with CLI tools, and
>>> trying to get revision control to play nicely, not to mention the fun
>>> and games of communicating with other humans, it's... quite tricky.
>> 
>> So what problems are you having, which distro, and where are you
>> asking?
>> 
>> Using openSUSE, there's nothing I had to do to "get Linux to work
>> properly", 11.0 basically just worked for me.
> 
> I've got it all straightened out *now*. ;-)
> 
> My problem wasn't actually "getting Linux to work", but rather "getting
> Linux to do what I want". But in my experience, Linux package managers
> are often very awkward to use. You know - the whole "I want to install
> this one package, and no I don't want to also upgrade 3,657 other
> packages to a different version".

openSUSE's package management seems to do pretty well with this.  If I 
want to install Virtualbox OSE, I just run "yast2 -i" (for a graphical 
way to do this) or "zypper in virtualbox-ose" in a terminal window.

The package manager figures out what's needed, resolves all dependencies, 
and installs the necessary packages.

> Weirdly, this kind of thing never seems to happen on Windows. I guess
> because "Windows" is one monolithic block of software, whereas "Linux"
> is several billion tiny pieces, all of which are in a sense optional.

While not as common as it used to be, dll hell still (to what I hear, not 
being a Windows user) happens.  But much of the time packages include the 
version of the DLLs they need and use them rather than the installed 
system libraries.

> After that, I had all the fun of trying to work out how to operate
> makefiles, where the stuff I want to alter actually is, how to operate
> the version control system, and so forth. Plus getting hold of a human
> over IRC seems to be like getting blood out of a stone. I guess
> everybody is in a different timezone to me?

Try online forums instead - you're already familiar with them.  Ubuntu 
and openSUSE have very vibrant online communities.

I never use IRC to ask for help - just never needed that sort of 
immediacy.

> It's sorted now, it just took rather a lot of effort considering the
> triviallity of what I actually set out to do. ;-)

Which was what, out of curiosity?

Jim

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