Oh, oh, oh. I don’t like Apple anymore.
I wanted to download a Mylene Farmer album from iTunes Music Store. I selected the album, made sure I had enough credit, clicked "Download"… and it told me that I needed the latest version of iTunes. iTunes 7. It’s been out all of a week, and now all Music Store customers need to upgrade.
I go to the Apple site and go to download it… and it’s frigging 34 megabytes! (By comparison, AmaroK is 14.5 megs). So, grumbling, I download it, and have an idea.
Windows has a feature called "Run As", where you can tell it to run a program as a particular user, or with the shoddy Windows equivilant of AppArmour. So I log in as a restricted user and tell Windows to run the iTunes installer as administrator.
Things go alright for a while, my existing iTunes 6 is erased. Then the installer tries to open up a new program. Unfortunately, Windows is too dumb to realise that a program run as administrator will want its child processes to also be run as administrator. This new program is run as the limited user, and of course the installation fails because of this. The iTunes installer ends off having to roll back its changes… except for the "deleting iTunes 6" bit.
So that’s why Windows users don’t use the Run As feature; because programs run with it don’t work properly. Either that, or they don’t realise how bad running as root is (I suspect the latter). It may also explain why new Ubuntu users always want to activate a real root account.
So I log back in as the administrator account, and install properly. During the install I find out that the installer includes a full copy of the latest version of Quicktime, which of course was not installed since I already have it.
To clarify: I had to download ANOTHER copy of Quicktime embedded in an installer! There’s a lot to be said for the dependancy system on Linux.
iTunes 7 works now. It’s simply crazy that the installer was over half the size of the album I wanted to download.
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