Serendipity

After trying out many distros, I had come to like PCLinux. It had most of what I wanted in a OS without being tied down by paranoid security protocols. The inability to get Wine installed was a major blow. Since installation had failed on one system, and on the other system the installation proceeded in the same lines, I had given up hope of being able to live with just one distro, needing a second distro like Mandriva for the wine utility and the ability to run windows games.
But, a reinstallation of Wine seems to work, even though I do still get a lot of errors. Since I had enabled saving the packages locally, for the reinstallation there was no more downloading. The application manager went through the motions of the installation, and abruptly stopped with errors. BUT, fortunately, the Wine name made an appearance in the programs menu, AND more importantly, launching it worked without glitch.
I still have been unable to replicate the reinstallation success on the other system. No matter how many times I tried to remove and reinstall Wine, it always crashed on launch. Online, there are no sources of information to shed light on this situation.
The conclusion I have arrived at is that a lot of serendipity is associated with program installation, especially when dealing with new program installation. I am of the view that the Wine installation would not have been a problem, had the installation DVD of PCLinux been used, since in that case the packages would have been installed along with the OS. There are obvious advantages of using a CD, since one would rarely need most of the apps on the DVD. So if both are as easily available, the latter is a wiser choice.