after tinkering around with the vine-loaded laptop
>>6, I came to the realisation.
How user friendly are mature linux distros (ubuntu, mint, fedora). A simple example:
$ > gocr
The program 'gocr' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install gocr
bash: gocr: command not found
The system will search for the package and what to type to install the said package. very efficient and productive. Type the stuff, wait for the download and voila!
vine has synaptic shipped as well, but because vine is an independent based distro, one cannot just use ubuntu/fedora repositories.
So has to compile source code and going through hours of dependencies issue and downloads.
Ah well, at least I brought my own personal laptop so I can continue working, hurrah!.