Complaints

I am sooooo tired of having to install all these dependancies for the programs I want and it seems that each dependancy has its own dependancies! why cant these things come with all the files they need to be installed? This and trying to get those damned rpms unpacked, I hate those things too! There must be a way to make self extracting rpms or a program that will do it automatically for you. No wonder windows is the operating system of choice, Linux is too hard for the casual user to use.

Dungeons and Dragons Famous Last Words:
"C'mon DM,let's see some REAL monsters!" And then you turn the corner as the Dungeon Master chuckles... DM: "It hits and... Oh hold on... I need more dice"

What about rpms gets you?

rpm -Uvh your.program.i586.rpm

intalls precompiled rpms, and

rpm --rebuild your.program.src.rpm

compiles them.

If you just want to get at the source for a source rpm, just type:

rpm -i your.program.src.rpm

and it will make a /your.program directory in your sources directory. cd to that and there's all the source files...

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

The thing with rpms is I dont enjoy typing. Yes I am a lazy baastard. I want to just be able to double click an icon and let it extract itself, and when I install a program I want it to have all the files it needs to run, that way I just double click a file, and BAM it is installed rather than me typing novels worth of commands for each rpm I must install. I tried to get divx running the other day and I spent hours searching for all the files I needed to extract each rpm. I gave up when my deskstar turned deathstar. speaking of which I need to repartition it again.

Dungeons and Dragons Famous Last Words:
"C'mon DM,let's see some REAL monsters!" And then you turn the corner as the Dungeon Master chuckles... DM: "It hits and... Oh hold on... I need more dice"

Best advice: http://freshrpms.net/apt/

1) why cant these things come with all the files they need to be installed?

because that'd make each "thing" extremely large to download - consider that the authors would have to include EVERY dependency, not just the ones YOU need, so each rpm would end up as a mini distro of a couple of gigs

2) "There must be a way to make self extracting rpms or a program that will do it automatically for you." Define "self extracting", please? Do you really want rpm's that install themselves as soon as you download them? Or when you receive them as attachments?

"well then the distros should include all the most common dependencies"

And IMHO they do :-)

"by self extracting I mean like a self extracting zip file for windows, you must click it to have it unpack the rpm"

Let's see.... 'click the red hat', 'click Home Folder', scroll down to find the rpm, double-click, enter root pass, installing, done. That wasn't so hard.

"and it should also be able to locate and install dependancies via the internet automaticaly"

Okay, the file manager can't do that, but apt can: http://freshrpms.net/apt/examples.html

--
"In a world without walls and fences, there'd be no need for windows and gates"

Actually the thing I've found annoying is installing something and then it never shows up. I have mandrake 9 running and decided to install apache. So I ran the package installer and everything seemed fine, but when I went to look for an icon for it, I couldn't find it anywhere. If they want to compete with MS then they need to get the little things to work. Average Joe computer user isn't going to know what to do if an icon doesn't show up LOL

Arrg

Think of it like MS services. You don't get an icon on the desktop, but you get an apache/httpd service in your run-level set-up, which usually has a GUI to configure it. I don't know Mandrake 9, but a 2 minute squiz at there site turned up <A HREF="http://images.mandrakesoft.com/img/9.0/s25.png" target="_new">this</A>.

Average Joe probably doesn't need an industrial strength WebServer for their daily use.. but I'm having trouble seeing how much easier much of this needs to get.

<i>Do I look like I care?</i>