Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 22nd Feb 2007 23:24 UTC, submitted by Andrzej Ptak
There are currently at least five popular ways of installing software in GNU/Linux. None of them are widely accepted throughout the popular distributions. This situation is not a problem for experienced users - they can make decisions for themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, installing new software is always pretty confusing. The article tries to sum up some of the recent efforts to fix this problem and examine the possible future of packaging software in GNU/Linux.
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Member since:
2005-07-02
These companies used by such studios do not support or offer binary packages for their commercial software to be used on Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu and Linspire.
http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien.html
Yes, this can be dangerous for system software, and should not be used for that, but for apps it often works quite well.
BTW, the reason these big commercial vendors will only offer a few versions of their apps is not because it's hard to package for multiple distros, but because they don't want to *support* multiple distros. Also, they often have commercial agreements (i.e. partnerships) with RedHat, so the choice of distro is also a strategic decision.
Edited 2007-02-24 18:15