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

[mikeymike]

Why do there have to be a tonne of different ways to install software on Linux?  I'm trying to install VLC (www.videolan.org) on Mandrake Linux 10 and it's being a real brainache.

Just port Amiga's Installer to Linux, get everyone to use that, provide a command line version as well to keep 'those' people happy, and all this pointless stress doesn't have to happen!

[keltic]

Gentoo Linux:
-------------
bash-2.05b# emerge vlc :-)

[spihunter]

I've been screaming at Linux people about this for years!!!.
To me that is the #1 reason why Linux is "not ready for the desktop". I dont want to spend an hour trying to get something installed. RPM's only work half the time if your lucky.

The Amiga installer would be great on Linux. You would think they would like it considering what you have to do to write a Amiga installer for your program. Its right up thier alley.

[ajk]

Fortunately debian packages work quite well :-)

Nevertheless, this A1 requires OS4 :-(

[bhoggett]

mikeymike wrote:
Why do there have to be a tonne of different ways to install software on Linux?  I'm trying to install VLC (www.videolan.org) on Mandrake Linux 10 and it's being a real brainache.

You mean you're trying to upgrade to the latest version (0.7.2), right?  Because you can install 0.7.1 without problems though the standard Mandrake software installer or using urpmi.

Just port Amiga's Installer to Linux, get everyone to use that, provide a command line version as well to keep 'those' people happy, and all this pointless stress doesn't have to happen!

Porting the installer would be a total waste of time. It's just a GUI on top of a script. That's not the problem.

The problem with Linux is that you have numerous disributions which do things in different ways. Packages are installed into different directories, config files are stored in different places etc. On AmigaOS there is only one configuration.

Furthermore, the Amiga Installer doesn't even attempt to deal with dependencies. It just barfs out a message saying xyz is missing and it's up to the user to find and install whatever is missing. Linux systems like apt, urpmi and yum do a great deal more, but they need someone to prepare the packages first and put them in a repository. This is the equivalent of someone actually writing the Amiga Installer script, but since there is more information to deal with, it's more complicated.

With Mandrake, installing via rpmdrake (the GUI to urpmi) is  very easy indeed, assuming you've added all the needed repositories to the urpmi configuration. Debian, Fedora, SuSE and others have similar systems that also work very well. The problems occur when you don't stick to the available packages and start downloading source tarballs or alien rpm packages (an rpm prepared for Mandrake is not the same as one prepared for Fedora or one prepared for SuSE).

This is an aspect of Linux which has always been a problem, but it is getting better. Let's not confuse the issue by talking about the Amiga Installer though. It has nothing to do with the problem, and is a very primitive system to boot anyway.

Going back to Mandrake, subscribed Mandrake Club members can request Mandrake rpm packages of software that hasn't been prepared yet, or which has been updated since the last package was released.

You can install from tarballs, of course, but then you have to do all the hard work. Installing from rpm packages prepared for other distros is definitely not advisable.

[womr402]

The FreeBSD pkg system and ports tree is about the best out there for installing software on a *nix type system.

[mikeymike]

Just about all of them are great when they work, it's when they don't, which is pretty often, that it becomes a real pain.

I couldn't find VLC in Mandrake 10's software install/update system.

[GadgetMaster]

Just a standardised way of installing software for all linux distros would make life so much easier.

I guess it's difficult when there are so many cooks making the broth. :crazy:

[adolescent]

There is a standard way...  Every package I've ever tried to install has been the standard configure && make && make install.  Works 99% of the time, unless a dependency isn't met.  

If you're talking about RPMs, they are platform/distribution dependant.  You wouldn't expect to install software for a Sparc on your i586 would you?  If you want to make sure it works with your distro then get the SRPM.

[Tomas]

That is the main problem with linux, every distro has their own kind of packet manager/installer and their own way of doing things... Unitedlinux was a project to change this, by making all major distros use same kind of standards to do things... Many linux companies was involved, including SCO, but as darl mcbride joined, and sabotaged the whole project on purpose..

But anyway, things are not hard to install if you use a distro with a decent package manager, like the distros based on debian.. With debian based distros, i only have to type apt-get install vlc and it will download both depedencies needed and vlc itself and install it all automaticly, without you having to do anything else.. With apt-get, i find it easier to install and update software than updating/installing software on windows. RPM just suck, as it does not solve depedencies for you..

Just here the other day, i installed kde3.2.3 in less than 10mins by just typing apt-get install kde-core or something... apt-get is really sweet  :-D

[bhoggett]

mikeymike wrote:
Just about all of them are great when they work, it's when they don't, which is pretty often, that it becomes a real pain.

Well, urpmi works the vast majority of the time here, unless I dip too many toes into the Cooker.

I couldn't find VLC in Mandrake 10's software install/update system.

That's probably because you haven't set urpmi up to use any other repositiries except the CD/DVD that you installed it from. vlc is in the contrib repository, so I don't think it's included in the standard distro.

Take a look at EasyURPMI for setting up urpmi to access the most important repositories. You'll want the "10.0 official" and the "main", "contrib", "update" and "plf" repositories as a minimum. Once you've got these set up urpmi works very nicely indeed.

P.S. You'll probably want to install vlc from the plf repository rather than the contrib one. "urpmi vlc" will do this automatically, as plf rpms supercede the mdk ones if the versions are identical. plf packages often include stuff which cannot be distributed in the mdk repositories due to copyright or licensing issues.

[bhoggett]

adolescent wrote:
There is a standard way...  Every package I've ever tried to install has been the standard configure && make && make install.  Works 99% of the time, unless a dependency isn't met.

That's the point though. Installation from source tarball does not address "dependancy hell". You still have to chase up all the required software yourself, make sure you have the right versions, and ensure you're not going to conflict with anything already installed. This gets out of hand very easily when you have to upgrade x to make y work but then need to upgrade z to work properly with the upgraded x, etc...

apt, urpmi and yum are attempts to get around this problem. RPM is not such an attempt in itself.

You are of course quite right about sticking to the right rpm for your distro, or else preparing your own binary rpm from the src rpm instead. (This is not always the simplest of processes though.)

[bhoggett]

apt-get is great for debian based distros. For Mandrake there's no reason not to use the default urpmi system, as it works in a very similar way.

Installing vcl with urpmi is as simple as typing "urpmi vlc" into a shell as root or using rpmdrake. Assuming urpmi has been configured to point to the urpmi repositories, of course, but that's the same with apt-get.

[mikeymike]

Take a look at EasyURPMI for setting up urpmi to access the most important repositories. You'll want the "10.0 official" and the "main", "contrib", "update" and "plf" repositories as a minimum. Once you've got these set up urpmi works very nicely indeed.

Now for what I guess must be a stupid question - why isn't this done by default?

- edit - VLC still won't install.  It gets much longer through the process, dying at "some package requested could not be installed: vlc.....i386 (due to unsatisfied libdv[=>0.99]) (Y/n) Y

Bang.  Head.  Against.  Desk.

One other amusing thing about attempting to install Linux distros on my PC - I've gone through quite a few, and some of them failed on IDE detection.  When attempting again to install Mandrake I wondered whether the APIC might be having anything to do with it, so I disabled it, then IDE detection went fine.  I now do a dmesg and find that it re-enables the APIC on linux boot.  Go figure.

- edit 2 - I've written an article about my adventures with Linux so far: http://www.mikeymike.org.uk/mikes/040529.html

[adolescent]

bhoggett wrote:

That's the point though. Installation from source tarball does not address "dependancy hell". You still have to chase up all the required software yourself, make sure you have the right versions, and ensure you're not going to conflict with anything already installed. This gets out of hand very easily when you have to upgrade x to make y work but then need to upgrade z to work properly with the upgraded x, etc...

And porting the Amiga Installer would not address this.  The supplied package managers address dependecies very well.  I think what the original poster wants is Windows style installer (perhaps he's afraid to ask?) that includes all neccessary libs in the setup package.  That or more staticly linked binaries.  I dont see either happening anytime soon.