On Friday, December 21, 2007, at 08:45AM, "Paul Johnson" <pauljohn32@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >I've been in this same situation and lately I've grown tired of >constantly updating Fedora systems that, at least on the surface, seem >to work fine. Especially on servers, where users are using very few >GUI programs, the update has no functional benefit. > >At the current time, I'm testing the longer-lived linux distributions >on 2 machines. Since I like the RPM system, I stayed in that family. >I've installed CentOS5 and Scientific Linux 5. Both are offshoots of >RedHat Enterprise Linux. > >On a user workstation, I do not think I would recommend this strategy >because those distributions lag quite horribly in the introduction of >the "creature features" of the desktop. No Gnumeric, no inkscape, old >R, old firefox, old thunderbird, and on and on. I started trying to >keep track of the applications that I needed to build and or update >for an SL5 system and it has been pretty time consuming. I actually have gnumeric/abiword and lots of other goodies built for CentOS - http://www.pennywasted.info/centos/yjl.php That repo is primarily Fedora 8 packages rebuilt in mock for CentOS 5 It's not in the repo I linked above because they *replace* CentOS provided packages, but I also built FireFox 2 and Thunderbird 2 for CentOS 5 - http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/repodata/repoview/firefox-0-2.0.0.10-3.el5_1.yjl.0.html and http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/repodata/repoview/thunderbird-0-2.0.0.9-1.el5_1.yjl.html Thunderbird is a straight rebuild of the FC8 source RPM. FireFox 2 - I made some very minor changes to the RPM spec file: http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/src/firefox.spec.diff Note that upgrading FireFox results a different gecko-lib. I had to rebuild the CentOS yelp as a result - http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/yelp-2.16.0-15.el5_1.yjl.0.i386.rpm It's possible there are other apps that use gecko-libs that will cause a firefox 2 upgrade conflict if installed, I haven't yet walked the CentOS repos to see what requires gecko-lib. Anyway - if they are of any use to you, enjoy.
