On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:
:
when i asked the organizer to identify the specific version of RHEL that was being used at the client site, i was told 5.3 so i can easily install 5.3 on the classroom machines, but i'm curious about something and i'll have my contact look into it: if people *initially* install 5.3, is it standard behaviour to still regularly upgrade as new releases come out?
Terminology: generally an upgrade refers to moving from one major release to another, whereas an update is moving forward to the newest sub-release. I.e., CentOS 5.5 -> CentOS 6.0 will be an upgrade (and not recommended as an upgrade per se), whereas CentOS 5.3 -> CentOS 5.5 is an update.
obviously, i have to ask my contact to verify what the client has been doing all this time but, in general, what's the normal behaviour for people running centos/rhel? and is there a way to examine an install to see how updated it's been since that original installation?
Check /etc/redhat-release; also uname -a if you know which kernel to look for.
i just don't want to teach off of 5.3, only to find out later that they've been keeping up to date and 5.5 would have been a more appropriate choice. thanks for any tips.
They're both CentOS 5. The differences are mainly (but not exclusively) in security enhancements, upgrades to applications (like Firefox or OO) and the like. I would check to be sure if you think it will make that much difference (and it might - 5.3 is what, a year old now?).
HTH
Mark