Adam Batkin convinced me to give his darn RedHat 9 a try, so I thought fine, it can’t be that bad if everyone in business and all the ITS servers are using it. I installed, and then Adam goes away to Israel, and I’m completely baffled by this system. I’m used to Debian doing automatic dependancy checking and keeping everything up to date, but RedHat doesn’t seem to have that at all. Why not? I mean, how can you use a system that doesn’t do that? I try to install GAIM and it needs three libraries, I download them and try to install but they need two more. I get those two, but they need another one. That one needs three more. This is just impossible. How can people do this all day?

I must be missing something important and fundamental. Can someone please tell me what it is? Is it that I’m not paying RedHat to use all of their standard packages through the RedHat Network?

I tried installing Ximian Desktop, hoping that would clear everything up through their “marvelous” RedCarpet software (Adam’s word). But I can’t, because RedHat doesn’t have wget installed by default. What the heck? Sigh, back to RPMFind I go…