[Discuss] Firefox with RedHat Fedora

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-01-17 15:42-0800 Murray Strome wrote:

> I agree that LINUX installation really needs to be improved. Though I don't 
> like Windows very much, at least most programs (except some GPL ones like 
> OpenOffice and GIMP) are much easier to install and update on Windows, LINUX 
> can be a big pain.

This is exactly contrary to my experience.  Let me explain.

I have been dealing with exactly this issue in the last few days with
libpango. libpango is important to PLplot because it provides excellent CTL
(complex text layout) capabilities (useful for rendering many non-European
languages potentially used on plot captions) and advanced font handling. But
it does these tasks by using the capabilities of ~6 other libraries.  I
don't have direct experience with windows, but the PLplot windows developers
blanched at the prospect of dealing with that many dependent libraries even
when there is a GTK+ site (libpango and dependencies are a subset of GTK+)
which annotates all the dependencies and exactly what should be downloaded
on windows to get libpango to work.  One of our windows developers got it to
work within a day or so, but the other is still struggling.  Contrast that
binary compatibility mess with what I do on my Debian and Ubuntu systems:

apt-cache search pango |less       #to find the name of the package I need

apt-get install libpango1.0-dev

Note, this last command automatically installs all required dependencies.
So if you are familiar with the command line, the install just works with no
muss, no fuss.  OTOH, if you prefer a GUI front-end to apt-get instead, then
the libpango development package installation is just two clicks (one to
search, one to install) away.

To generalize this in a fair way, I claim from this experience that Linux
installation is currently MUCH better than windows for programmes that were
originally developed on Linux (a big qualifier).

This statement is important because the number of Linux-originated software
packages that are being ported to windows is growing rapidly right now
thanks to CMake (a replacement for the combination of autoconf, automake,
and libtool which is faster, much easier to understand, and which works on
all Unix/Linux platforms as well as all versions of windows platforms [e.g.,
Cygwin, MinGW, or bare windows with just MS commercial compilers and build
tools]).  KDE switched to CMake last year (and have full plans to deploy
their software on windows as a result).  PLplot and many, many other Linux
software packages are rapidly following suit.

The downside of this export of Linux software to windows is the windows
installation part of it is a huge bottleneck because of the problems I noted
above.  Thus, there is a clear need for Linux-like windows distros which
solve all these windows binary compatibility issues for Linux-originated
software packages.  With at least 400 different groups (mostly volunteer)
willing to make distinct Linux distributions, I think it is only a matter of
time until this install problem is solved with the volunteer (and perhaps
even commercial) distribution approach on windows.

So I am going to predict that in the near future we will see lots of
"windows" machines that run nothing but "Linux" applications on top of a
windows core so the result will be almost indistinguishable from a pure
Linux experience.  What a nice way to turn Microsoft's insistence that all
PC's must come preinstalled with a windows core against them!  Simply
automatically overlay Linux applications (KDE, etc.) on top of the core with
an "apt-get" like installation procedure.  That would be a huge revolution.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________