Re: [Evolution] How do you install 2.29 on Ubuntu 9.10?

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend schinstad gmail com>]

2009/12/2 Bryan Karlan <chunnel yahoo com>:
> I want to try 2.29 to see what it has improved upon.  I have little
> experience with Linux.  I have Ubuntu 9.10.  I have downloaded the file and
> have extracted it.  However, I find no install or setup file as you would in
> Windows.  I still can't understand why in Linux such simple things are made
> so darn complicated.  How can I figure this program out if I can't even
> figure out how to install it?
>
> Bryan


This is bottom-posting, I enter what you said first, then respond to it. It
makes it easier to understand the context and what I'm replying to. If I
entered your text to the bottom, then you'd have to scroll back and forth in
order to understand what I was talking about. This is considered bad
netiquette and, to some, rude.

But anyway; I just wanted to add something to what's already been said.
This is not a beta-version, it's far earlier than that. But even when it
_is_ released, it won't be as easy to install Evolution 2.30 in 9.10 as it
would be to install a new version of Outlook in Windows.

This is not a "Linux" issue. There are great differences between different
Linux distros, so that using OpenSUSE is very different from using Ubuntu.
In Ubuntu, and most other Linux distros, we use package managers. This
is what makes it so easy to install applications in Ubuntu, using Ubuntu
Software Center, etc.

There are pros and cons to this approach. You get all the software from one
source, so the chance of downloading the software from the wrong site and
getting a manipulated version (like downloading Winzip from
www.MyMuchCoolerWinzip.com) is eliminated. Since applications are split
into packages, the software downloads are also alot smaller. If you have
Mozilla Firefox installed, for instance, downloading Mozilla Thunderbird will be
much faster than in Windows, because Firefox and Thunderbird shares alot
of parts. In Windows, you'd have to download the entire software every time.
This means you'd have to install the same software twice. For more general
software, you might download the same software ten times, where you'd
download it once in Ubuntu. By sharing application parts (libraries) like this,
Linux is also able to optimize your RAM usage, freeing resources to
other things.

And that brings me to the cons. Because you don't download large bundles
of software, like you do in Windows, but instead only download the things
you actually don't already have, you need to have the same versions of the
pieces of software. This is what makes it more difficult to just
install a different
version of Evolution, for instance. The pieces depend on one another, so that
while you could replace Evolution with a newer version, that might also mean
that you had to replace other softwares which you didn't really want
to replace,
etc.

This is a fundamental difference between Windows and Ubuntu: Windows
doesn't really care or know anything about the applications you install. In
Ubuntu, the applications become part of the global system. This also means
you can plan for changes: you know that every six months, applications in
Ubuntu are upgraded. You'll get a new Firefox, new OpenOffice.org, new
Evolution, etc. You don't really have to keep track on the progress of the
different applications manually.

Hope that helps,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad