Montana Jones

Montana n: A state of the northwest United States bordering on Canada. Admitted as the 41st state in 1889. The fourth largest state in the union, it includes vast prairies and numerous majestic mountain ranges.
Syn: Treasure State, Big Sky Country, Last Best Place.

Jones n: slang. An addiction or very deep craving.

Monday, June 26, 2006

Linux

L_:
Those Red Hat disks you burned for me, one of them doesn't read. It's like disk two or three. I couldn't get it to install.
Me:
Bummer. It must have been either a bad download or a bad burn. Want me to try again?
L_:
No, I just went back to DOS. Making cute little text boxes and stuff for my payroll program.
Me:
You know the distro that I have been hearing about a lot lately, supposed to be really good for Linux newbies is Ubuntu.
L_:
Choosing a version is all about what you want to do with it. But the thing is, and this is where I cant find any information, is how do you put a new program into Linux? Maybe I need to re-read my books again and pay better attention but I haven't figured that out.
Me:
I know what you mean. I got stopped pretty much at the same point in my learning curve. I have had some success with RPM. The Red Hat Package Manager.
L_:
But a lot of these download sites on the net don't use packages.
Me:
Or they just give you source code and tell you to compile it.
L_:
Or they give you the source. I don't know what to do with that.
Me:
It's like one of those things that's so basic everyone assumes you know how and so no one bothers to teach what to do.
L_:
And I can't figure out where to put anything. You have to deal with dependencies and you have these TGZ files and I just don't know where to put anything in that file system. I can't find help on it; it's not intuitive. I can't put new programs on Linux.