On 10/31/07, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We have lots of Fedora systems and it is turning out to be too much > work to keep them up to date. I have to rebuild a lot or RPMs when > the kernel is updates, and that is getting to be a hassle. If I could > do a major system update every 18 months or 2 years, it would be fine. > The unexpected bug introduced by frequent updates (much less > re-installs) have lost some of their charm for us. for external kernel modules id recommend taking a look into dkms. saves you alot hassle. regards, Rudolf Kastl > > So I'm going to spend some vacation time at the end of the month to > see about these longer lived Linuxes. Got any advice? I expect some > of you Fedora users have been on the other distributions. > > I only want to consider RPM based ones, because I'm very familiar with > RPM and don't like DEB as much (just not as familiar, I guess). I > don't necessarily want one that is "good for newbies." I don't want > one that closes off too many options (recently switched from Gnome to > KDE because latest KDE offers much more customizability of window > manager and desktop than Gnome). > > Scientific Linux is appealing because it has a cool sounding name (for > academics) and it provides OpenAFS drivers and has a long life. But I > worry that it will be harder to get RPMS for it to play MP3s or such. > gxine has been pretty good lately for my students who listen to > Brazilian radio stations. Nothing else can, it appears. So If I > switch to SL, maybe I just buy one kind of trouble. > > I started to wonder if anybody had tried to update a running F6 or F5 > system onto one of the other RPM based distros. It appears to me that > CentOS or SL are RPM based, and I was thinking it might be fun to just > try to run an upgrade by installing their packages. Maybe remove > fedora-release RPM and see what happens. > > In the past I've resisted adopting these longer lived distros because, > well, they get outdated and frustrating because they don't > interoperate with the rapidly changing part of the Linux world. Last > time we bought RedHat Enterprise 4 I noticed that thunderbird and gcc > were lagging behind the official releases by a long ways. When we > went to update some research software, we found we had to re-build > newer gcc and update tcl/tk in order to put in the software we wanted. > One time, the upgrade of gcc required me to rebuild the whole > toolchain starting with glibc, bison and whatever else depended on > them, so having a "long lived" distribution amounted to a lot more > work. > > So maybe I don't want Scientific Linux or CentOS. Wish the > RedHat/Fedora Legacy group had not disbanded. For security updates on > a one year old distro, it was very handy. > > -- > Paul E. Johnson > Professor, Political Science > 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 > University of Kansas > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list >
