by John McDowall
|
|
| Technology Musings by John McDowall |
|
|
Tuesday, August 13, 2002 Installing and Managing SoftwareOver the last several weeks I have been working with Redhat Linux. This has been like meeting an old friend after several years and being pleasantly suprised that they have mellowed and broadened over the years. After several years using Windows I found my fingers easily remembering unix shell commands etc. The major area where see that my old friend has progressed is in the area of installing and managing software. Many years ago I worked for a company that shipped software for a variety of Unix platforms (, Windows and VAX/VMS). Installation was a nightmare, I can remember trying to develop standard proceedures even for one platform, trying to determine which version of X-Windows and which window manager and where all the files were installed became a byzantine process. Later as Windows evolved I was introduced to the Windows registry and discovered just how badly you could screw up a system. With all this behind me I approached RPM's with a high degree of skeptism, but while it is not a perfect system I was very pleasantly suprised and see that RPM's are a major step forward, and make Windows installs look primative. The use of RPM's starts to put the intelligence about the system into the network, using Redhat's update manager significantly simplifies the upgrade and maintenance of the system. It still has a long way to go before it becomes seamless but it is moving in the right direction i.e. simple and functional, while Windows appears to be spiraling towards increasing complexity. I have written before about why computers are to hard to use, one of the major issues is the time we spend keeping them up todate. RPM's significantly solve that problem and make the entire process almost invisable to the user. There is obviously a large gulf still between a Linux desktop and a Mac in terms of ease of use and management, but starting with the fundamentals and fixing them is the correct approach. This is in contrast to the Microsoft approach of paving over the faults with a new GUI tool rather than attacking the system design flaws. What are the other fundamentals required to deliver an easy to use and manage system? posted by John McDowall | 11:09 AM |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
 |
||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||