Just say NO to CNR!

Story: They're fallin' like dominoes: Linspire makes a deal with MicrosoftTotal Replies: 5
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vainrveenr

Jun 15, 2007
11:37 AM EDT
Just how pervasive is Linspire's Click N Run anyway? Besides the original Linspire/Freespire's CNR and the CNR in Ubuntu, just what other distros has CNR really penetrated???

Besides the attempt by Ubuntu to uncouple CNR out of its package list, perhaps the best course of avoiding Linspire's falling domino is to use either native package management systems or package management systems clearly other than CNR.
tracyanne

Jun 15, 2007
2:43 PM EDT
Look CNR is a pretty good technology, it's not perfect, but it's good. It's not that Synaptic ot drakconf can't do what CNR does, and I can see that Mandriva are duplicating the best parts of CNR in Drakconf, so there is nothing about it that can't be done fairly easily.

One of the things that CNR doesn't do is something I would like to see done is a greater seperation of the libraries from the applications, I'm still seeing far too often that applications i don't want getting installed because the package contains libraries that are need elsewhere.
Abe

Jun 15, 2007
3:54 PM EDT
Could some one who used CNR and Synaptic tell us how they are different or better?

Would be nice.

tracyanne

Jun 15, 2007
7:46 PM EDT
CNR attempts to bring the various applications packages together in and application centric, rather than a package centric manner, I know this is sometimes a subtle distinction. You don't need to know that GIMP is an image editing tool, you need only know that you want to edit images. You don't need to know that Totem is a Movie player, only that you want to play movies.

But the CNR is more than just about managing packages in an application centric manner. It also enables you to set up multiple machines with the same desktop and the same applications. The data is stored remotely, so in practise, and I've done it you can set up a machine in Kickatinalong (nice town) and then pop on ever to Woopwoop (another nice town) and set up another machine for someone else using your CNR account to synchronise the two machines' application set. very useful in a business that's distributed across the state or country or the world

The CNR also offers user ratings on the various applications, so that a new user can get an Idea of what applications are popular.

Synaptic, like apt, and drakconf and smart are package centric, and they don't have a number of the extras that CNR has. There is no reason, other than developer priority, why they can't be. In fact Mandriva seems to be developing drakconf into a CNR like package manager.

Abe

Jun 16, 2007
12:01 PM EDT
Quoting:tracyanne, bring the various applications packages together in and application centric, rather than a package centric manner
- Thanks for the info.

That is very helpful, and I believe Synaptic can be easily made to do that since it has a brief and full description of every package it has. Any discro that have their own deployment server can do that by changing the short description to a meaningful name plus a short description. The difficulty is finding good names that consistent across distros for the shear number of applications.

The rest I am not impressed with. Synaptic can do the user friendly install quite easily.

For remote desktops in corporate environment, you can use Debian Package Manager dpkg (command line), which I consider to be a lot more practical and efficient.

I believe with CNR, you would need to do certain configuration and setup to work properly. You make it sound to be so easy which I don't believe it is. Is it?

I really not that impressed by CNR.

tracyanne

Jun 16, 2007
2:16 PM EDT
Quoting:You make it sound to be so easy which I don't believe it is. Is it?


You may have to take my word for it. It actually is, especially if you are a Linux newbie.

but

Quoting:I really not that impressed by CNR.


Nor am I, not enough to want to use Linspire or even Freespire, both of which I believe to be broken. That's why I stopped using Linspire in 2006, and went back to Mandriva with 2006 Powerpack, and only ever ran Freespire on my test machine. In my opinion Mandriva's Powerpack is the best commercial value add available, and they are doing it without resorting to what appear to me to be shady patent deals with Microsoft.

In addition I think drakconf, which was my first introduction to easy package management, back in 2000 - 2001, is a really good packagemanager, and the changes Mandriva are making to it will make it better than CNR.

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