The Magical Mandrake day!
Sunday, started at its best... calm weather, pleasant and refreshing sunday morning - one of the best days I longed for quite some time. So, I thought that I could get onto something productive, and started on to get into some ruby coding... been a long time infact. Oh! there was no ruby available for mandrake linux. Oh well... urpmi ruby gave me a list of ruby based libraries and modules, but no ruby interpreter itself... a little search on the google and I hit on some vague sites with ruby rpm packages that are a bit too old.
So, I thought... I already have the source tarball with me... mounted my gentoo partition and untarred the source tarball and typed the customary './configure' in the source directory. Ouch! there was no bison, no flex, no yacc! not good. Searched for them on my Mandrake CD-ROMs, and they weren't there. Got the source tarball for these tools and compiled them (Gentoo was a friend at its best).
Oh not again! No ncurses-dev, no readline :-(. Untarred these tools from the source again built them. Got ruby built and installed. Now I tried to connect to my postgresql database... and *ouch, no postgresql client library! Hmmm... after a wasting some time trying to figure out how to get postgres client library package installed... I realized that there was just one quick way out for me... build postgresql too, from the source!
After a long fight with mandrake... I got ruby working and connecting to postgresql database! Now my worry is, why wasn't it all installed by default (when I selected each and every package from the install CDROM). No, these packages were not on the CDs too... which again makes me wonder.. what do those 3 CDROMs of Mandrake 10.1 community edition have at all ? Slackware 10 bundled a lot of stuff on 2 CDROMs which Mandrake couldn't bundle on 3 of them ?! Heh... makes me wonder why I ever did I waste time installing and constantly fighting with Mandrake :-/. Oh yes, something I appreciate though... it was well polished, detected my weird dot matrix printer which I couldn't get to work on Slackware.
Why do they have to make Linux distro that doesn't cater to developers ? Its like selling a gadget without a technical specifications and service manual!
Gone are those days, when all distributions looked more or less the same, in terms of packages being bundled, and feature set. Strangely, most distributions are now aligning themselves to either "Desktop/Workstation" environments, or "Enterprise/Server" environments. Granted, there are distributions like Debian and Gentoo that go to the extremities of masochism! None of these "popular" distributions cater to a Linux enthusiast anymore. Either they cling on to a typical M$ philosophy (assume the users are always dumb), or they try to be yet another Enterprise UN*X environment.
Perhaps I'm making a big mistake of trying to get myself accustomed to distros other than Slackware itself. It has always catered to my needs well... it was always easier to manage and maintain and never came in the way when I'm doing stuff. Oh yes, it was more compile-from-source friendly too.
Perhaps, its time for me to say good bye to mandrake now ;-) and get back to Slackware