Into.the.Void.

I’ve heard a lot of times that windows is a lot easier than Linux, that you cannot easily install programs on linux and so on and so on…so here’s my little story from yesterday.

A friend came at home today and he had to finish a project for today. His project involved some math problem solving and unfortunately he had chosen Microsoft Office and MathType to do it. So I rebooted my PC from Linux to Windows XP and that’s how about the problems begin. Upon booting to windows various popups started appearing that programs needed update. The anti-virus (I would have nearly forgotten that word while using Linux, unless someone very very close to me ( 🙂 ) kept asking over and over about Panda Antivirus, heh), Windows itself, acrobat reader and so on…OK, maybe that was my mistake because I had not booted into windows since last September when I needed it for a project of my own. Then I wanted to install Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word to be exact. I found an old CD of mine with Microsoft Office XP Pro and put it inside the tray…I opened the cdrom drive with Windows explorer and what I saw was…shocking. At least 10 to 15 different executables with weird names and some .msi files. In fact…here’s what the cd contents look like!

athlios:/mnt/cdrom%ls -1
access.msi
autorun.inf
excel.msi
files
fp.msi
instmsi.exe
instmsiw.exe
msde2000
office1.cab
ork
outlook.msi
owc10.msi
ppt.msi
pro.msi
proplus.msi
readme.htm
setupacc.exe
setupexl.exe
setupfpg.exe
setupolk.exe
setuppls.exe
setupppt.exe
setuppro.exe
setupstd.exe
setupwrd.exe
sharept
std.msi
word.msi
athlios:/mnt/cdrom%ls -1 | wc -l
28
athlios:/mnt/cdrom%ls -1 | grep .exe | wc -l
11
athlios:/mnt/cdrom%ls -1 | grep .msi | wc -l
12


So there’s 28 files in the root cdrom dir, 11 of these are .exe and 12 are .msi. As far as I can remember .msi files can be “installed” as well. And…surprise surprise!! there’s no “setup.exe” inside…but a bunch of various setup???.exe. What do we do now ? Oh … there’s autorun.inf…that should tell us.

athlios:/mnt/cdrom%cat autorun.inf
[autorun]
OPEN=setuppls.exe /AUTORUN
ICON=setuppls.exe,1

shell\install=&Install...
shell\install\command=setuppls.exe

It’s obvious right ? I need to run setuppls.exe!
And now…time for some problems!
Everytime I clicked on setuppls.exe I got this beautiful error message:
The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. You may be running in Safe mode or Windows Installer may not be correctly installed.
I tried the other setup???.exe files too…same error again…
What is Windows Installer Service ? I am surely NOT running in safe mode…and how could I have incorrectly installed something that I don’t know what it is ?
After some trial and error and some googling I came up to the conclusion that I had to run “instmsiw.exe” first and then the infamous setuppls.exe.

And then …wow! the installation begun!

Is that what windows people call “click and play” ? Ease of Use ? User Friendliness? GIVE ME A BREAK!!!

Do you know how HARD was to install OpenOffice (that has built-in mathematics support, so you don’t need MathType crap) in Gentoo Linux ?

emerge openoffice-bin

And if it even wanted to install something like “Linux Installer Service” it would have done it without any user intervention because it knows what a dependancy is.

Now…Who is user friendly ?

Every time I have to boot into windows it reminds me how happy I am with Linux 🙂 Thanks to all the redmond guys…you ROCK!

Filed by kargig at 03:29 under Linux
1 Comment | 4,288 views