Why do I upgrade?

[uteck]

I just got my laptop all settled down and working nicely with Fedora7. I figured out the wifi problem I was having with knetwork-manager was because I had configured eth1 with another tool. Now I had roaming wireless working fine and vpn also. All I had to do was get VMware working with the vpn so the MS apps could talk to the corp network and I was set. No more booting into Windows for me.

Then I saw a post on howtoforge.net about upgrading from Fedora 7 to 8. Now I had to have the latest version. I followed the instructions, but it was no joy. I had added a few other repositories to yum and that was causing problems with the upgrade. But then I remembered apt. One "yum install apt" latter and a modification to the /etc/redhat-release file and I was downloading 1.4 GB of Fedora8. ( I was working a 12 hour weekend shift, so I did not mind eating up the company bandwidth.) :-p
Why did they get rid of knetwork-manager? It's replacement sucks. It does not work anymore so I need to configure each access point manually. Guess I'll just live with it for a bit and see if it gets updated, or just install something else. I grabbed a copy of the Dell remaster of Ubuntu7.04, does that work well on D610?

[danieldk]

Unfortunately, with many of the short release cycle distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu except LTS), there are short support timeframes (after which no security updates will be available). If you want to run something for the long run enterprise distros like CentOS/RHEL or long-cycle distros like Debian Stable are much better.

[jml]

I have to agree with Daniel on this one. I run Debian Etch on the laptop I need to get real work done on. Its a bit of a chore setting everything up, (third party repos, proprietary codecs, and drivers etc,) but once that is done, all I have to deal with is the occaisional security update. And the apps in Etch are current enough for my needs so I don't even play with testing. Given my preferences, the long release cycle of Debian Stable fits my needs perfectly. I have tried to like Fedora, but downloading and installing applications is such a tedious process. I have been really spoiled by apt.

Now its a whole other story for my test box. ;-)

Joe

[fos]

The Mepis distro on my little box has been a couple of versions old for a while. I backed up the items I needed to a new usb 2 gb flash (That cost $22!) and started testing recent distros.

Fedora had Gimp 2.4 rc 3 which is a plus but I just didn't like it. Ubuntu 7.10 - same. I have PCLinuxOS on my "big" box but it has been out of date and without support for several months. I use it for important apps, so I'll just use it until CentOS comes out with a version that has Gimp 2.4. Or at least when I can install it without issues. I'm hoping 5.1 will work with the new Gimp.

I settled on Debian 4.0r1. It has everything I need except Gimp 2.4. Since it is my little box I'm going to try installing it from source tomorrow. The default browser was Gnome - yuk. The fonts were terrible. I installed iceweasel and it is better but I still need to install some decent fonts, maybe verdana.

The Debian install is now a piece of cake. It wasn't a problem at all even on my old via c3 mini-itx M10000 board. I have to tweak the audio but it seems to be working somewhat. I didn't have to do anything with the cable internet. It configured automatically. Quite a change from the old days.

fos

[danieldk]

On Debian I usually have these font packages installed:

ttf-bitstream-vera
msttcorefonts
ttf-dejavu

msttf usually does the trick fontwise (the package post-install scripts download the Microsoft fonts for the web).

I don't use The GIMP excepts for some basic stuff. I don't think CentOS 5.1 will make a difference wrt the GIMP, because the basic libraries (GTK+ etc.) stay at the same version.

[jml]

If you need a reason to try another distro, (yeah, right.....) I found that Mepis ver 6.9 RC6 (the future Mepis 7.0,) is also very good. I have it installed on one of my test boxes. An HP nx6110 laptop. It is now based on Debian Etch rather than Ubuntu, its very stable, supports all of the hardware on my HP. It even recognized the Broadcom wireless card out of the box, loads native Linux drivers and supports WPA encryption from a GUI interface. Not bad for what is essentially a one person distro. So Frank, if you want to update your Mepis install, you may want to look at it.

Joe