Ubuntu chronicles, pt.5 (including copious bitching about the Ruby on Rails setup process)

It doesn't look like things are going too well between Ubuntu and myself.

I just had a total system freeze. Even holding down the power button didn't send the Term signal or whatever that it did before (when, admittedly, I tapped it out of curiosity.) Man, I haven't had that in *ages* with Windows! Application freezes, occasionally, yes, but not a whole system freeze. I thought that didn't happen on Linux...

Well, anyway, I was trying to get Ruby on Rails up and running before the freeze and it wasn't going well. I was getting a routing error (and apparently I'm not the only one) and I suspect it has something to do with the version of ActiveRecord or gems or something or other. RoR is a *bitch* to set up. Whatever happened to providing me with a package that I can unzip (sorry, untar) and run with? No, I had to go to Synaptic and download Gems and then get rails from Gems and then realize that somewhere along the line there was an issue (I think the Gem thing gave an error initially but worked when I re-ran it -- it's the main suspect at the moment.)

My Linux experience so far has been:

1. See application 2. Run application 3. See application fail 4. Get dependencies, extra utils, etc. etc. etc.

5. (Sometimes) Get application working.

I'm sure it's second nature to Linux folk but to someone coming over from Windows it sure feels sloppy.

It's funny to say this perhaps, given Linux's reputation, but in the Windows world we expect things to "just work". On Linux, it seems to a be a constant struggle of "how do I get this to work?" With the battle being half the fun?

I'm keeping at it because, on the other hand, it just feels so right and I know things are going to get easier as I learn more about the operating system and how it likes to be petted :)

(And, hey, being a noob again is just plain fun!)

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