[ale] Linux for sale

[Dan Newcombe]

On 2 Sep 1997, Lex Spoon wrote:
> On the contrary, I think it makes a serious difference.  If Linux is
> to take over the world, yes, there needs to be an easier option to
> have it preinstalled.  

Yes.  Many of the books I've seen show you how to follow the
slackware/redhat install scripts, but don't give much advice on what to do
if things go wrong with your particular hardware.  This puts a bad taste
in peoples mouth and many stop right there.  
 
> which to use, if the industry only decides to give them that choice.

Not just the hardware industry - but the SW industry as well.  If you
can't run Quicken on Linux, whay should the average joe care to know about
it?   However, if you were to pickup a copy of quicken, and it said on the
box that it supported Linux as well as x,y, and z, that may help to raise
peoples curiosity.  I love Linux, but without application support it's
just a wonderful way for me to use Unix at home.  
 
> Can you imagine a world where hardware comes with example source code?
> Where applications are written to portable, well-specified API's?  Heck,
> where applications come with full source code??

I just got done watching the PBS "Triumph of the Nerds" and one of the
things on it was the turmoil Bill Gates caused when he started to protest
people freely passing around copies of Basic for the Altair.  Not quite
the same as paid software coming with full source code, but once you have
that, it's wide open.

> To me, this is the grail.  A world dominated by one brand of Linux is
> still half as bad as a world dominated by MS Windows XYZ-of-the-day.
> But a world where all software is open to the tickerings of
> wireheads....  Ahhhhh :)

The problem is there is no one brand of Linux.  In fact the Windows
xyz-of-the-day is more organized than the Linux camp.  You have 95 and NT
4.0, and some 3.51 and 3.1.  Mainly the first two.  You then have Debian,
Caldera, RedHat, Slackware, and a few other minor ones.   The difference
is that most of the apps for 95/NT will run on NT/95.  

However, as soon as you try to put a new Linux app on a system, it may
have been setup on a slackware system and being installed on a debian.
You not only have different directory trees, but probably library version
differences.  This makes it a pain, and somewhat worthless to try to
install precompiled binaries on Linux.

Okay - you say that source code is available.  So you try and compile it.
Well, turns out the copy you got doesn't have the linux specific patches.
So you get them, but they were against the previous version of the code so
you find that (probably without some features).  Or if you're lucky, it
works out of the tarball.  So you go to compile, and you find that you
only have the runtime libraries installed for Xpm, so you have to go find
the development ones to compile/link.  Then it turns out this app was
written to use Qt, or TkStep, or Xforms, or GnuStep, or whatever the
library of the day is.  So you have to get that...and posssibly compile
that, which puts you back at the top of this paragraph.
(True case study - in compiling MindsEye, I had to install a new version
of MesaGL to be compatiable with what was wanted.  I then had to install a
new version of Qt.  Even though that was a binary install, I then had to
recompile Qt, because the qgl library wasn't included with the binary
distribution.)  While this may work for people knowing their stuff - if
you are new to all this, it becomes annoying and too much trouble REAL
fast.

Don't get me wrong - I've been using Linux for 5-6 years now, since you
had to install GCC, X, etc... very manually.  But the problem of exposure
is not the only, or really even the main problem with Linux.  One of the
main problems is that unless you know what you are doing, or are a decent
sys. admin, Linux is nothing more than a pain in the ass.  There are way
to many differences between the distributions, and libraries change way to
often.

Look at companies porting to Linux - they will only poart to Caldera,
because that is a known target they can port to.  You can not make a
generic linux app - or even get close to it yet.  Until this is fixed,
Linux is really nothing more than a hackers toy, and a cheap means of
making use of a Unix system by people who know what they are doing.

Feel free to respond/argue, just keep it civil.

--
Dan Newcombe                                      newcombe at mordor.clayton.edu
"Maybe you were always beyond my reach and my heart was playing safe, But was
 that love in your eye I saw or the reflection of mine?"  --Marillion