Ximian Desktop Installer, Red Carpet, and MonkeyTalk

An anonymous reader submits: "Long-time Linux users forget what it is like to try to install something for the first time. Ximian has done a nice job writing scripts to hide the inner workings of a Gnome installation. TuxReports has snapshots of the Ximian installer. Do you believe that all Linux distributions should use such a friendly series of dialog boxes in order to attract more users to Linux?" Update: 07/14 21:13 GMT by M : Tuxreports has provided a non-PHP page for us to link to... whoops. Sorry about that.

Comments

Red Hat users note

[GigsVT]

If you corrupt your box with this Ximian Gnome, you will not be able to upgrade Red Hat without uninstalling Ximian beforehand, or manually replacing all Gnome RPMs after the upgrade.

This is something they don't tell you in all those "friendly installers".

Other things may break, such as the Red Hat Network, when a Gnome related updated comes down the line. Of course if you plan to only use Red Carpet after installing Ximian, then that's not a problem.

Great, but has its downside

[warmcat]

Installing Ximian is sticky in the same way that Installing an updated IE on a Windows system reached in and changed operating system components.

I had Ximian on Redhat 7.3, then when I upgraded to the Limbo beta the installation notes warned of dire conflicts between unnamed ximian RPMs and recommended removing Ximian from the machine.

There is no option I could find to roll back Ximian, the same way that there was no option to roll back an IE upgrade on Windows.

In the end I used GnoRPM to nuke eavery rpm with .ximian in the name and was able to successfully update to Limbo. But it ate a couple of days threshing around.

Worth bearing in mind that Ximian is a major brain transplant for your OS and that may have impacts later. But on the positive side, it was very slick and the red carpet thing was nice.

But I am happier with the stuff in Limbo, it rocks!

Re:How do they make any money?

[kerskine]

Actually, there are two ways we make money on Red Carpet:

• Red Carpet Express, which offers customers fast, dedicated bandwidth for getting software updates.
• Red Carpet CorporateConnect, which is a hosted service that enables organizations to manage their own internally developed software in addition to getting updates of Linux, Ximian, and other software offered by Red Carpet.