port Amiga's Installer to Linux! End the pain!

[minator]

Bang. Head. Against. Desk.

To get vlc 0.7.2 working on BeOS:

Download from BeBits
Unzip

That's it. Who needs an installer?

It's automatically added to the list of movie players so I can open videos with it in a single mouse click.

Now, why can't Linux do this?


Note: BeOS was part based on the Amiga.

[minator]

See above. BeOS is like AmigaOS in that there is only one version. There are dozens of Linux distributions, and at least a handful of different "base" builds the others are derived from.

If you moved everything around on BeOS it would still work, a query could find (say a library) in a different location in under a second.

However VLC didn't even need this, it decompressed as a single file which could be run from anywhere.

Note: BeOS was part based on the Amiga.

Or so the hype went. I haven't seen all that much similarity,

The CEO had a number plate of "Amiga 96" given to him.

The Amiga used to be the multimedia machine, Be tried to take on that mantle with the best media subsystem going.  It also had high responsiveness, good multitasking, and had very good useability.

The Amiga in it's day was the most advanced machine around, for the most part it's now been surpassed.  BeOS picked up where the Amiga left off using many of the same concepts (system wide scripting, datatypes etc.) and added more, in many cases it's technology has yet to be surpassed - all the fuss about metadata being added to Longhorn, OS X and Gnome (storage) is funny because it has been in BeOS for *years*.

Like the Amiga it is also very efficient, my PC (800MHz Athlon, 512MB RAM) never goes into paging despite having a number of apps running, WinXP on the same machine is significanty slower and starts paging like crazy as soon as I open a window.

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Actually I read that one of the main reasons Beos finally died was because Microsoft bullied the hardware companies ( ex: Dell, Hp) from offering dual boot machines with Beos.

Yes, Be even offered the OS for free at one point and it still wasn't included.
Microsoft later settled out of court for $23 million.

[minator]

Microsoft's behaviour was publically blamed for Be Inc's failure - not least because that gave more weight to Be's case against them - but in reality they were merely one of many factors. The main reason Be failed were Be themselves.

I partly agree with this but I mainly blame Microsoft.
Many of Be's decisions were forced on them:

Hobbit to PowerPC because the Hobbit was canned.
PowerPC to x86 because Apple killed the Mac clones and wouldn't give them details of Apple hardware.

They did begin to get interest from serious 3rd party developers from the Audio industry and could have taken over that market but for the focus shift.

The focus shift happened because they couldn't make money on PCs, by not getting the OS to a wide audience they couldn't get developers, by not getting developers they couldn't get more users.

If Microsoft had not forbidden companies to dual boot BeOS would have shipped on many systems - even Dell were said to be interested, everything else would have followed from there.

But by not getting users in the PC world they ended up going after the IA market instead because there was no other way to make money.  That killed the Audio companies interest and the rest is history.


I do think they made the mistake of only concentrating on the technology, they should have made a "solution" becuase that's ultimately what sells.  Unfortunately in the Tech industry this is a very common mistake and one notably Microsoft have not made.