[Wylug-discuss] [WYLUG-DISCUSS] Stuck with Ubuntu?

[Paul Brook]

> > The trouble is that everyone ends up asking
> > for a stable base with their particular most loved apps kept completely
> > up to date (and everyone has a different set of most loved apps).
> 
> Possibly true of many folk. All I ask is that apps are kept
> **reasonably** up to date, i.e. not allowed to fall impossibly behind.

Which is a fairly meaningless defintiion.  It all depends what you consider to 
be "reasonable".

> > The enterprise stable distributions (RHEL, Centos, Ubuntu LTS, SLES etc)
> > give system stability and *security maintenance*, but not feature
> > maintenance.
> 
> If anything is to be taken from earlier WYLUG list discussions this is
> not entirely true. The RH-based distros, it appears, will upgrade an
> app in time for its (the app's) developers to withdraw support from
> the version included in a still supported distro. That is sufficient
> for my purposes. My preference is for Debian-based but I have yet to
> find one where that is the case.

Again, I don't think this is a particularly helpful definition.  It's entirely 
dependent on upstream release cycles.  These vary greatly, from projects which 
maintain multiple stable branches for years at a time to others which throw 
out a new release every few months and immediately abandon the old one.

> > At the other end are distributions like Fedora (we boot most of the
> > time) - proudly on the bleeding edge.
> 
> Which I used to enjoy. Past tense, hence this thread.
> 
> > If you want something in between its often easiest to take the stable
> > base and maintain your own specific stuff on top - this is why I tend to
> > deploy applications on Centos, but have a complete perl stack that I
> > maintain and deploy to them on top.
> 
> Now there's the rub. I don't need anything beyond the standard,
> usually included, apps.

Standard for whom?  The set of packages installed on the average server is 
almost completely different to the set used by the average desktop machine.


Also, it sounds like you problems are actually due to inadequate support on 
the install CD.  This is a competely different problem.  As a rule of thumb 
you need to be running a kernel newer than your hardware.  Once you drop an up 
to date kernel in there the rest of the distro will probably work fine.  
Install media is particularly vulnerable to this problem as it tends to be 
built once for the original release, and never updated.  It's generally not 
that hard to build yourself a USB install image with a different kernel.  Or 
install on a different machine (or inside KVM), move the system disk accross 
and fix the bootloader.

Paul