When people look around for reasons to say that Linux is just too hard, they will invariably arrive at software installations. The classic refrains include the difficulty of building from source, the problems with dependencies, and so on. Although there is some truth hidden in there somewhere, building from source is rarely necessary for mainstream packages because precompiled applications exist for most major distributions. Again, on the issue of package dependencies, most distributions use software installation tools that take care of the whole dependency issue for you, such as SUSE’s YaST, Debian’s apt-GUI, Synaptic, or Mandriva’s urpmi to name just a few.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could install any Linux software package just by clicking on the package name? In a perfect world, your package would download from a central server and then just run, regardless of what distribution you were using or what release on which your system was running. Well, that world is here now. Join me and check out my latest Linux walkabout on InformIT.com to discover the secrets of klik.

Enjoy!

— Marcel