[vox-tech] What's in RedHat 8.0

[Bill Kendrick]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 10:50:11AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> i would _definitely_ without a doubt stay away from debian and gentoo.
> cut your teeth elsewhere.  install redhat, mandrake or suse.  no doubt
> in my mind whatsoever.

I have a bone to pick with Mandrake.  I don't have any direct experience
with the latest 8.x versions, but I've had to do a lot of tech support for
people using them who are trying to use my software.

More specifically, they're trying to install libraries and such
(which are part of Mandrake; they're pulling them off the CDROMs!)
and when they finally compile and try to run something, it dumps out a
ton of library-related errors - typically about OTHER libraries not being
found.

In other words:

  my program depends on -> [SDL and friends]
  (this is documented, and it won't compile without them; pretty obvious)


They install SDL from their MDK CDROMs, but...

  SDL and friends depend on -> [esd, alsa, yada yada yada]
  (however, SDL installs just fine without telling the user to install
  those other libraries' packages)


So at this point, everything looks happy.  Then they run my program and
out come errors about missing libraries.  So they e-mail ME.


My response is usually:

  "*shrug*  Works for me.  Sounds like SDL needs some other libs.
  Install them off your Mandrake CDs."


Lather, rinse, repeat.  Eventually I tell them to grab the SDL RPMs off
of www.libsdl.org.  Sometimes it even works.

:^(



Just venting... sorry.

-bill!