Sorrows of installing software on Linux

I wanted to watch a divx movie on my aspire one laptop which runs a Linux based OS. I tried to play the file but I did not see the video in the preinstalled video player. My next logical step was to download VLC for Linux. But as it turns out there is no VLC for Linux, there is a VLC for Ubuntu, Fedora and Source Code for any other flavor of Linux.

It took me a good 30 minutes of searching on half a dozen forums to figure out a way to install VLC. It takes less than a minute on any windows based machine even if you download the zip version.

And I thought this was a problem just with windows. As it turns out if you are using Mac OSX there is a separate version of Safari for Leopard and Tiger while a single binary edition for Windows XP and Vista. Guess Microsoft is doing something right somewhere.

I was working on one of my friends computers which had OSX and Safari 2.x and figured it would be better if I installed Safari 3.x on it. I downloaded Safari and the moment I tried to install it it refused to install since I did not have all the updates.

That just goes to show that you can run Safari on a 9 year old Windows PC but there is no way to install Safari on a 2 year old mac without all the updates. And I am not even sure if it was only about the updates or it wanted to install a new updated OS.

Here is a video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in a 1983 Dating Game video.

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