Earlier tonight I requested a bunch of packages via Synaptic in Ubuntu. It automagically figured out some others I would need and I ended up installing 296 packages -- 1.3 GB download. My Qwest dsl is pretty fast because the download took less than 5 minutes. A few minutes later it was done. Contrast this experience with what I used to go through 10-20 years ago. Computers were much slower. I would download source code by ftp and compile it. A package like Octave could take a very long time to compile and install. You'd run configure and make, but you'd get errors. It would stop and tell you that you were missing something. Then you would have to figure out how to get that thing -- maybe flex or bison or some newer version of gcc -- but after you found that thing, you would have to download it and compile it. It might require software that you didn't have, so you would look for that. It could take several days to chase all these things down. In the end, you still might not be able to compile the program. There were never any guarantees. Things usually went better with Solaris because most people seemed to use Solaris, so I also used Solaris. My point is, things are better now. Way, way better. It's really quite amazing how well these things have worked out. Also, now that almost all former UNIX users are running some Linux distro, precompiled binaries of most simple programs (e.g., genetic analysis software) can be made available, and they work. Mike