dear mandrake, i read in pc plus magazine (#165-july 2000) here in the uk that; 'analysts at wall street's JP Morgan have said that it's inevitable that linux will break up into a series of totally incompatible versions'. i wonder if mandrake see this as a possibility, if so do you see this as a bad thing as i know i do, and what input/influence do you have on the issue of compatibility. i chose to install mandrake because it was 'based on redhat' which i had previously tried and because i was aware that there were differences between distributions although as a newbie i don't fully understand what these differences are. i am currently reading 'linux unleashed' published by sams and this includes many references to the differences in configuring debian, red hat and caldera, i confess that i have assumed that the info regarding red hat is applicable to mandrake but i would not know if i was wrong in this assumption and if this was why some program or such did not work properly, clearly there is documentation for mandrake but if the above prediction were to become true or even partly so then an interested newcomer to linux would have an extra obstacle to overcome in learning about this alternative to other oses (ouch!) -wish- in the long term it may be that linux' successor(s) are fully compatible and that installing a program in one distribution will be as easy and have the same result as installing in another. in the short term that is clearly not the case and as a wish for future linux i would hope to see a program install utility that goes beyond what i know of rpm packaging, such a utility would be able to detect the information if any pre built into a program package - .rpm .deb whatever and give you the opportunity to alter this, a front end to the process of compiling and installing source code with these features would also be nice; in windows one occasionally comes across an install that asks where the program should be installed, tells you what and where files will be placed and gives you the option to cancel at this point. combining this with dependency checking would give the 'average' user like me more control and also understanding of my system. i know that kpackage can tell what files are going where but if i am running out of space and wish to install somewhere else i would like to be able to do this at install time without resorting to a command line. a program mover like 'magicmover' by powerquest would also be dandy, the only problem with the ext2 file system is that while the total amount of space available on the system maybe be sufficient to install a program this space may be distributed over more than one partiton and mount point, the actual relevant space available isn't hard to find but dealing with the problem of insufficient space can be. of course such a 'moving' utility would be difficult for an ordinary user to use as s/he may not have access to files that are used by programs and contain information relating to their configuration and i realize that allowing such a utility to run as root is a tad of a security risk, but if linux is to become a home user friendly os then i feel that utilities such as the above are necessary if by any chance all of the above is already pifflingly simple in X then feel free to come to cardiff and jeer at me. bascule
