John Summerfield wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
I have use RedHat since 4.(something) and I like Fedora and hope to
stay with it. The issue I have is downtime to do a full re-install
and get things configured. In the past I have had problems with
missing/dropped/depreciate packages that have caused me headaches.
Issues with secondary repositories not creating new packages for the
latest FC until requested. And all the other fun things that keep
showing up on this forum. For home use, I cannot afford a second
spare computer.
With FC8 just about to come out, I am still waiting until I get F7
working at home for my wife to allow me to move her from FC4 on her
laptop. I cannot take more than a day to do this and she needs all
her applications up and running. But some of issues are are not the
Fedora teams fault, as the applications are provided by secondary
repositories.
I came across this article that discusses rolling upgrades in contrast
to scheduled upgrades.
http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/231-The-Absent-PCLinuxOS-Release-Cycle.html
Now this is a pro-PCLinux discussion but some of the points brought up
are interesting. Of course they have been brought up on this and the
users lists before.
Reading about the changes to development in F8 and later versions of
Fedora, I wonder if it would be possible to look at doing a rolling
upgrade instead of a release?
I don't normally "upgrade" by doing a fresh install. If I want to
upgrade, I boot the media and upgrade.
I would not expect to have a system down for anything like a day; while
there might be a touchup required, the basic apps (wordprocessing, web,
email) can generally be expected to work.
My current desktop was a fresh install, I installed Scientific Linux
5.0, then generated a package list from my old system, a crossgrade from
FC3 to self-built Nahant-clone, and used that to run "yum -y install" or
similar for everything.
I then copied my ~ from my old system, and that goes back at least as
far as RHL 7.3 via Debian Woody/testing/Sarge.
I did that on a "new" system, so I had no downtime, I didn't change
until I was happy.
In your case, I suggest you give Fedora a big fat miss, and use one of
the RHEL clones.
I know of two continuing projects:
CentOS, a community project and the more popular
Scientific Linux, sponsored by US Govt.
I use White Box Enterprise Linux 4 on one system, but I don't know that
the project is continuing. I don't think there's a reason to prefer it
over CentOS. There was also Tao, but that merged with CentOS a while back.
Those are both supported for years, and probably you will install one
and be able to run it until you replace the hardware.
The problem is many of the RHEL clones have fewer applications
supportted than a new version of Fedora after two years. For a work
machine, not a problem. A home machine, this is a headache, a big one.
This is why I couldn't upgrade/update Fedora on my wifes machine at
first. Missing applications that she uses.
I am hoping to put F8 on her machine after installing it on my desktop.
--
Robin Laing
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