On Sep 3, 2005, at 11:08 PM, digitaladdictions wrote:

> I really do think modern Linux distro's are easier to use than windows
> and involve less tinkering. I realize people are scared to type but
> with a single command you can download and install a program, without
> worrying about finding it or any of its dependencies on the web the
> package manager takes care of all of it for you.

Heh.  I just turned on my debian linux system, after about a year of
not using it.  I wanted to install gputils and such, figuring that
would go somewhat more smoothly than it did on my mac...

So, after six hours or so of recovering from a forgotten root password
(wasn't it nice of it to configure itself so that booting in singleuser
mode wasn't sufficient to fix such things.  Anyone know how to turn
that "feature" off?), I fired of deselect, eventually figured out how
to get it pointed at a site that knew about gputils, and had it ready
to update and install that, along with some assorted systems updates
it thought I should install.

Hmm.  600+ Megabytes of assorted systems updates.  Including who knows
how many megabytes of KDE "games" that were "required" by a mysterious
chain of dependancies, plus "edutainment" packages with useful stuff 
like
a russian language tutor.  I *think* I weeded most of that out, and
got down to a more reasonable 400+ Mbytes of download.  I let that
go overnight, fiddled with the instal and configure errors today.  And
now, only 24 hours after I decided to download gputils, it looks like
it's working!  "Package managers make things easy" - HAH!

Sigh.
BillW

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