[geeks] Ok I am ready to kill this Fu**ing linux box

[Kurt Huhn]

> >>> Seeing that plenty of other people have managed to get xine working on
> >>> Linux
> >>> without all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you seem to be
> >>> experiencing,
> >>> I have to conclude that the problem lies not in Linux.
> >> i had the exact same problem with vendor-supplied and user-installed
> >> rh7.2
> >
> > Congratulations.  What does that have to do with what I wrote?
> 
> i think it goes a little further to explain that this is not a problem
> with just one person. its not so easy to say its user-error when there
> are two users independently experiencing the same problem.
> 

IMO, two people out of millions doesn't make a valid statistical
sampling.  While Linux has it's shortcomings, I think most of the
problems experience by Mike are not with *Linux* as the kernel, but with
the GNU stuff built around it.  Failed dependencies aren't Linux's
fault, rather they're the fault of the developer, packager, distributor,
or (gasp) sysadmin.

There are very nice tools that do the package dependency resolution for
Linux.  Yast2 comes to mind - search for the package you want to
install, check it off, click install, it finds the deps and installes
them.  Quick and easy.  This doesn't hold true for all distributions
though, and RH is one of the worst, IMO.  Yast2 also may experience odd
behavior when using an RPM not provided by SuSE - but SuSE provides a
**metric assload** of packages, so chances are it's there.

I also just demonstrated that even otherwise fine OSs can have the same
issues when I built Minicom.  The dependencies are what will kill you,
but once you've done it a couple times, you begin to understand what
you're looking for.  Yes, dependencies suck, but they're not confined to
Linux, and they don't automatically make Linux suck.
-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com