OSNews: Review of Ximian Desktop 2 on Red Hat Linux 9

“I will start with the review of the install process. It is not
going to be glowing at all. I have this suspicion they tested it
from their own offices and their own network because it is giving
too many problems they seem to not have anticipated. The idea was
very good, but it lacked in the execution department. Here is to
hoping for a updated installer for the masses.

“Strike 1. It tried to download packages which would have been
available from the Cd’s. And to tried to pull them from the Ximian
servers which were absolutely swamped. It should have asked for the
user to locate the packages if he had them already(such as Redhat
Packages), and then downloaded them as a last resort if they were
unavailable.

“Strike 2. The installer had a local packages section, but this
did not work You could have copied the files to the cache so that
it skipped downloading them, but the installer is never supposed to
assume users know to do that.

“Strike 3. Even after copying the files to the cache to install
them, it failed to install again. In fact I never installed it
using their installer. It would quit without giving reason why,
even though I had manually made every package I was installing
available. I had to be very creative to install XD2 at the end of
the day…”

Complete
Story