WHAT HAPPENED
I tried using Bing to download some basic Windows stuff (dotnet). That browser is fucking atrocious. I didn’t think it could live up to the hype, but I totally underestimated just how crappy it can be. It would throw a fit when I was trying to install Windows components from Microsoft by not displaying the page because of “security issues”. Then when I tried to install Firefox, it threw the exact same fit. Solution? Get out of the virtual machine I’ve got it sandboxed in and download Firefox and Dotnet 6 under Linux, and then transfer those .exe files to the Windows install and run them there. This is beyond laughable.
Bing is dying, and this is why.
So why was I trying to download Windows stuff if I’m a Linux shop? Well, there was a free “kingdom generator” called “A Box of Flumph” that was written in 2006(?) and released under the GPL2 license for Windows only, and it used the Delphi IDE. This will not run under Linux, no matter how nicely I ask, and the files are 100% incomprehensible to every tool I’ve got. I wanted to look at the logic of this thing to see if I could incorporate a similar solution into my own design work. So what’s a small studio like mine to do? Install the free version of Delphi, of course!
Were it so easy.
Nothing I tried worked. I could install it, but I could not get it to run without .NET 4.5 (or higher). This is broken under WINE since version 6.1 for some reason. So I did what anybody would do at this point. I gave up. However, I did find an open source alternative after I’d done the monkey-dance for a couple of hours called Lazarus. I don’t know why this wasn’t found before I futzed around with Windows all that time, but I went after a download online and got myself a .DEB file. And you know what?
THAT didn’t work either!
What the hell was this shit? I got hit with the dreaded “Dependency is not satisfiable” error, which means I was fucked. There was no way possible to get this to install (via a -force flag) without breaking my whole system. I was discouraged and wasn’t sure what to do next, but I decided to have a look in the repositories with a “sudo apt-get install lazarus”.
HOLY SHIT THEY HAD IT! The whole time, yet! I got it installed from the repositories without a hitch, and in hindsight I should have tried that first, but since I was in “Windows mode”, I went scouring the interwebs for questionable downloads rather than seeing if it was in a safe repository first. Man, working tired isn’t good for you.
CONCLUSION
Don’t work tired. You’ll make stupid and avoidable mistakes, which will waste a lot of time. I was eventually able to look at the code via Lazarus, and I’m unknotting that mess right now. Or I will be as soon as the convention is over.
I love my job.
-Alan