[Web4lib] blue sky thinking

[Roy Tennant]

Karen,
There are ways to do things and then there are ways to do things. For
example, steps 1-3 could have been accomplished simply by buying a Mac.
Macintosh computers come not only with Unix installed, but with a pile of
basic applications such as Apache, MySQL, etc. Then, many other Unix
applications come in simple packages you can download and install as you
would a shrink-wrapped software application. And now that Macs can run
Windows, I can't imagine why anyone would buy anything else.

I know that isn't your particular situation, and I feel your installation
pain. I certainly have been in my own "dependency hell" before, where you
want to install something but first you have to install ten other things
upon which it depends. I also had a situation one time where the particular
version of something caused another application to fail completely upon
installation. It took months of chipping away at as I had time before I
solved it. The error messages are often completely cryptic and don't always
point to the root cause.
Roy

On 7/27/06 8:25 AM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Keith D. Engwall wrote:
>> Aside from having a good firewall to sit behind, what is the biggest reason
>> against doing this in-house?
>> 
>> We just put together an Ubuntu linux server for about $600 with 1 GB of RAM
>> and 400 GB of storage space.
>> 
>> 
>>   
> Having heard many statements/arguments for using open source software,
> about a year ago I decided to do the experiment myself. I meant to keep
> notes about how long things took me, what problems I ran into, etc. but
> it was so frustrating that I just couldn't immortalize it in a fixed
> form. But it went something like this:
> 
> 1) Get operating system and burn to disk. Since I was starting with a
> blank slate, I had to find a copy of the OS and get it onto a CD so I
> could install it. The particular application I was aiming at wanted that
> to be Debian. This was easy, maybe a half hour (note: I read the install
> documentation before downloading most software).
> 
> 2) Insert disk and boot up. Answer install questions. Here I got stuck
> for an entire afternoon, believe it or not. First, there were lots of
> questions to which I did not know the answer, so I was back to my other
> machine to read more documentation. Then there was one menu that
> absolutely stumped me -- not because I didn't know the answer, but
> because I didn't know how to make an "x" appear before my choices. I
> moved the cursor (tab tab tab) to the right spot and typed "x" -
> nothing. I typed "a" "b" -- basically I went through the entire keyboard
> - nothing. Added "ctrl" before them - nothing. Shift - nothing. I looked
> at the online documentation. It just said "select the ones you wish to
> install." Nothing on how to select. The next day I tried again, and only
> by accident did I hit the space bar - BINGO. So I wasted 4 hours because
> nowhere did it say that the way to select an item in a menu is to use
> the space bar. OK. I got over that.
> 
> 3) I now had a basic OS installed, but in order to run my app I would
> need things like MySQL, Apache, etc. I would need "packages." I have
> some experience with Red Hat (until they abandoned all of us desktop
> users), with Suse, and with something else that I don't remember now.
> Each has its own way to install software. I was on the phone to a friend
> who is quite well versed in Unix, so he offered to help me go through
> the package process. The first thing he told me to do was type
> "dselect". De-select? To get things? No, it means something like debian
> select, and you go through menus to get to a huge list of possible
> software packages to select and install. All I can remember about this
> is hours spent going through lists, selecting something I needed, only
> to get a screen saying something about dependencies, but no explanation
> of what I should DO about them. Many many hours. Eventually, I had stuff
> installed, but no idea if any of it would work. I didn't write it down,
> but this took days -- days because I would occasionally install the
> wrong thing and then want to uninstall it, or I'd go to install
> something and it would ask me questions I couldn't answer. In the end,
> the thing that always frustrates me about Unix is that I don't know
> WHERE my installed software is. There's a logic to it all, I'm sure, but
> I've yet to find a clear explanation.
> 
> 4) Now I installed the app I wanted to run, although it then needed some
> changes to things like Apache, etc., to work properly. I spent another
> day or so doing all of this. In the end, I actually was able to start my
> app. But at that point I had run out of steam, and the machine has been
> turned off since then. Maybe I'll spend my summer actually getting the
> app up and running as a functioning system. Then again, maybe not.
> 
> kc