But you don't spend all the time installing but coding instead, and 1.6 is harder, buggier, older, misses features(the feature you ask for is actually
directly provided in 2.0), has different naming convention so NO code in it will ever be directly portable to 2.0. The only reason to use 1.6 at this point is if you are starting a project using old engine that uses 1.6 and can't be easily ported to 2.0 or finishing up a 1.6 project or something completely bizarre and stupid(which might be very likely if you're a college student, if that's the case I'm sure we can find a workaround for this thing here).
I installed SFML,Thor, Box2D and SFGUI from sources and Irrlicht(source on windows, yum'd on fedora) on my Fedora and my Windows 7 under 45 minutes to 1 hour each(each system, not each lib, that'd suck..)
There are precompiled libs for Windows, download, unzip, done, I prefer to clone, cmake and compile myself but that's the easy way.
On Fedora(and only the first step is Fedora exclusive, other distros just use different naming for packages and different managers..) it's just:
0. su yourself as admin(or use sudo)
1. yum install git, cmake and -devel versions of all SFML needs(there's a list in the tutorial)
2. git clone git://github.com/LaurentGomila/SFML.git
3. cmake -i and answer the wizard when it prompts you for something
4. make
5. make install
Either way it's
easy but intimidating at first, I'm a complete newbie(kind of skilled according to some..
) and I managed on both systems using Google, man command, --help and tutorials.