On Tuesday 27 November 2007, Les Mikesell wrote: > Lamar Owen wrote: > > CentOS or RHEL plus KDE-RedHat fills that niche for my uses. > Does that provide a current firefox, evolution, thunderbird, OOo? It's a KDE repo. No evolution; newer kontact and friends. At one time a newer (or at least rebuilt) OOo was included. I don't see a firefox or thunderbird at first glance. Like I said, a niche; KDE of a new version built on an older base. This also can allow you to try out or run the KDE4 on older Fedora or EL, too. For EL dists, it requires EPEL. So look at the EPEL package repo, and then look at the kde-redhat.org repo for your distribution (kde-redhat is actually more than one repo; see the instructions at kde-redhat.sourceforge.net). Then decide for yourself if its idea of recent userland meets your requirements. > Exactly - a realistic estimate of the end user's time that will be spent > _just_ maintaining a working system and keeping stored data intact > over the span of a few years would be a good truth-in-advertising move. Fedora is, in my mind, an ideal distribution for enthusiasts who like to tinker and try new things. If you're not willing to follow the 'if you break it, you get to keep both pieces' rule, run something other than Fedora. I wish it were different; Fedora has the tech to be the premier mainstream Linux desktop distribution. Even Ubuntu's devs know this; I just did an upgrade of a 7.04 Ubuntu to a 7.10 Ubuntu. It was interesting, to say the least, to see icedtea (among other Fedora friends) in the list of packages. Ubuntu uses lots of other Fedora tech that people aren't aware of (but stand out like a beacon to those who have seen the Fedora work). But Ubuntu is not an enthusiast desktop; typical enthusiast hardware requires sometimes heroic measures to make work (like software RAID; have to install in text mode (which is a heroic measure for many!)). > I just wish we had a real competitor based on opensolaris with an up to > date userland environment (Solaris being backwards compatible more or > less forever...). Nexenta looked promising but hasn't had an update for > a long time. Are there any similar projects? That would be off-topic here, sorry. Might get an answer at BigAdmin. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
