When I installed my first Linux (Red Hat 9) I was trying to install Gaim on it. I was trying different methods and I managed to install it by source compilation but not through rpm.
Yeah, I started out on Red Hat (maybe 3 or 4.x) and spent years fighting with RPM dependencies. At one point I installed one of those source only distros on a spare machine for fun ("Source Mage", before Gentoo took over that space). For all the misery involved in having to compile everything from scratch on slow hardware, I was absolutely blown away that mplayer with proprietary codecs justworked out of the box. It always took me hours to get the right combination of packages on Red Hat to make that work and would frequently break whenever I updated anything.