The Windows program installer.

Say what you will about Windows, but Gates built a fine program installer. No guessing as to where to install. No dependancies. No useless instructions like "Yum" or "apt-get" for people who are not conencted to the internet (and who say that in their help erquests), and no overly-technical yet vague instructions from those who don't say "Use Yum" or whatever.

I like driving a stick shift, but that doesn't mean that I want to do my own brakes. I've modified ENVIRONMENT and PATH variables in computers since before Windows 3.0 was considered cutting edge. I don't mind tinkering, but there is a difference between tinkering and blundering. With Windows, I don't have to blunder.

There are linux programs that install fine, e.g. Open Office. For most other applications, it's agony for people who don't take computers out as their date to the prom.

Port the Windows program installer over to Linux so the rest of us can enjoy it.

um install Vegastrike or Unreal Tournament so there is an installer out there but not many programs use it (why) besides debian could have double click to install too instead of double click to open

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That's why I mentioned Open Office in my post. Beautiful Linux install package. But if developers aren't going to give us comprehensive installations with their applications, why can't we have an installer like Windows?

[QUOTE=moxieman99]----------------
That's why I mentioned Open Office in my post. Beautiful Linux install package[QUOTE]:o I have only installed Open Office from packages thanks for the crorection

I remember seeing a program that was just that but the main hurdle is so many flavors and so many architectures :twocents:

[QUOTE=mike10][QUOTE=moxieman99]----------------
That's why I mentioned Open Office in my post. Beautiful Linux install package------------------
Since so many people seem to say "Oh, just configure then make then make install" without telling WHERE or WHAT to "configure" or make or "make install," it seems that a Windows type program installer could use that format of installation (configure-make-make install) and find any dependancies located on your system that could satisfy the error message, and install into a default shared-across-users folder unless otherwise directed by the installing user.

Just like Windows.

yes not very easy :( how about a simple command ./install that dose it all in one go

I wonder if I could get that to work but alas I do not know how to program but.....maybe :newbie: :study: :jawa: can't be that hard to do can it? may have bean done already though

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Trust me, I went through the install files for mplayer and VLC until I was blue in the face, along with the configure files, too.

I had no problem with installing vlc & mplayer or any main stream program. Mandriva make it so easy to load anything. Now with obscure program it can also be a pain the the *&&^%^&* I tried to load an updated version of xine in my 1 Debia box after 3 1/2 hours of trying I gave up & put Mandriva on that one to. I rarely have a problem loading any program.

Have you tried running silelius with wine? it seems to be working?

It depends a lot on the distribution. Installing an RPM package on any reasonably advanced RPM-based distribution is simply a matter of clicking on the RPM file then following a few simple on-screen instructions. That's hardly that difficult.

Part of the problem here is that a lot of people offering "help" on here insist on instructing everyone to to do everything from command line, when in reality there are much easier methods. That creates even more problems when they present a line of code as an "instruction", such as "do rpm -u ./package.rpm", which is completely useless without any indication of what to do with that line of code.

Another problem is the variety of different package formats in which programs are distributed. The user has to individually learn how to deal with each particular method individually. Creating yet another different package format would exacerbate this problem even further.

Another problem is the variety of different distributions. Most Windows installations contain basically the same libraries, so it is easy for program developed to build programs that depend on those libraries, without any additional dependencies. Since there are so many different possible Linux installations with different resources included it is impossible for program developers to to write software o work on all of them, since there's no guarantee that the libraries it depends on will be available without installing additional packages. Another problem is that some installation methods, such as RPM, are not available on some distributions.

Package management systems such as the one in Mandriva do the best possible job of dealing with this problem. They can install required packages from the installation disks that were not installed when the system was, and look on the internet for required packages (if connected to the internet). There isn't really anything else that could be done here.

It is getting closer, but MIDI support is not fully functional, which to me is really important as I need to use my midi piano to input/playback music. At least it looks as if there are people working on it! this is good news!

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You know, I went back and did download the Fedora mplayer RPM, got caught in dependancy hell because mplayer couldn't find GCC or a bunch of other stuff even though I put them all into the same folder and did rpm -ivh *.rpm so they'd all install at once. Still no go.

Everyone seems to agree that unpacking tarballs and installing the unpacked t-balls using ./configure&&make&&make install should work, across all distributions. That being the case, it is not a distro question, it is an installer package question.

Linux will NEVER be a mainstream OS until that is solved.

Yep had that same problem with Fedora that why I gave up on it.

Maybe I should have said "Installing a well-behaved RPM package...". There are some programs that are awkward to install by any means. From what I can work out MPlayer is one of these.

I would just like to get a version of Wine and Ndiswrapper that actually... works. That way, this wouldn't be an issue.