Wayne D's Blog

I have been struggling with trying to get an open source program to compile on any of the version of Linux that I have available to me with no success so far. To add insult to injury the person who released the project has released executables for both Mac and Windows and not for Linux. Linux users have to be satisfied with a tarball because as any reasonably savvy Linux users knows Linux has it's own version of dll hell, shared library hell. Each Linux distro has a different set of what the distro considers to be the standard set of shared libraries. The package I was trying to compile uses qt4 which neither Centos, Ubuntu or Fedora core uses as part of the core distribution. Additionally this particular package uses a version of someone else's library that isn't the latest version. Finding the source code for this particular version of the package is very, very difficult because the maintainer has changed source control packages. This means previous version aren't available in the software repository. At some point I decided that four hours was enough time to struggle with this particular project and I installed the Windows version of the software instead. It took less than a minute to get it running not including the download time.

I was reminded of this problem today when Codeweavers released a version of Google's chrome browser that runs on Windows. The wrinkle? Instead of being a native Linux version it is a port of Chrome that runs under Wine, the Linux project that allows Linux users to run Windows software. Codeweavers have brilliantly avoided the problems with shared library dependencies by using the Linux Wine standard API, which is the Microsoft Windows API. I download the Chromium browser and had it running in less than 5 minutes. Wine isn't perfect, it wouldn't run the Windows version of the package I was trying to install earlier but maybe that's the path Linux should take at least in the desktop space. (updated Sept 24) Even better, it did run under Wine after installing Chromium Refine the Wine implementation of the Windows API and give people a real alternative to Windows. Now I have a dilemma on my earlier problem. Should I continue to try and get the dependencies satisfied for a native Linux version or would my time be better spent fixing Wine? Hmmmmm.