[olug] linux web server management ?

[William E. Kempf]

Jonathan Warren said:
> With linux it is easy to install software.

No, I'd have to disagree.

>  You just need to copy the
> package or source files to the server and either install them with the
> command line package tool or build them and install them.

You forgot about dealing with dependencies here!

>  For Redhat
> you would do the following rpm -i newpkg.rpm.  It will report any errors
> or problems or missing packages.

Yeah, now you get to track down the missing packages, repeat this process,
track down the missing packages for those packages...

And I've not even mentioned how difficult it can be to track down those
other dependencies, even with rpmfind.net.


>  Most source distributions can be
> installed by tar -zxvf source.tgz or tar -jxvf source.tar.bz2  cd source
> ./configure

And again, track down dependencies, repeat this process ad. nauseum.

> make
> make install

I get the feeling that some folks on here don't care for my criticizing
Linux, but the criticism is often warranted and can do nothing but
motivate people to find solutions to the problems.  In this case, there
are few solutions available.  Debian has apt.  Gentoo has portage. 
Mandrake has urpmi.  There's a port of apt for RPM based distros (apt-rpm)
which may help, provided you can find a good apt-rpm based repository for
your distro (the only one I could find was for RedHat).

Since switching to Mandrake and using urpmi I find installations to be
MUCH easier.  The only problem is that, once installed, most packages
require some configuration as well, and said configurations are often
arcane and difficult to learn.  The end result has been that most
installations for me still take most of a full day (some even longer,
unfortunately).  At least once I've learned how to deal with a package
I've got the knowledge and notes to repeat the installation in a matter of
minutes... but the point is that things don't have to be this difficult
for "newbies" (and I mean newbies to a given package, not newbies to
Linux... though the latter confounds the problems).  This is one area that
I think the Linux world really needs to start focusing their attention.

William E. Kempf