[CentOS] You didn't give me some packages, so now I'm giving you some! R, TexLive, LyX, Gnumeric, etc.

Paul Johnson pauljohn32 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 29 00:50:51 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 7:39 PM, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I tried Scientific Linux and found I had to re-build the same things
>> that I rebuild for CentOS, including R, because their versions lagged
>> behind the cutting edge.  I switched to Centos hoping that the larger
>> user community would generate more contributions of updated packages
>> for other things, like gnumeric or such.
>
> CentOS is strictly a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and yes, it
> lags quite a ways behind the bleeding edge, but that's what stable
> distributions do.

Right. We know that.

As I said in the original post, I'm looking to have a distribution
that is conservative on the kernel, disk support, network drivers,
suspend features for laptops, and all of the basic things like that.

I do not want the Fedora experience of having a palm device work in
Fedora 6, but not in Fedora 7 and 8, only to spend 20 hours reading
through debugger output and advice in bugzilla about what's gone wrong
with some kernel module or driver.  I do not want to play the game
anymore of "does my wireless still work?" on a weekly basis.  I don't
want to waste my "user time" trying to find out what's wrong in HAL or
the the acpi subsystem.

I don't want the desktop to change gratuitously. For me, there's been
no user-perceptible improvement in Gnome for about 4 years. As long as
it supplies a program menu and a file manager, that's enough.

I do want up-to-date applications that people here actually use, like
LaTeX, Emacs, R, Gnumeric, and the other ones I can provide.  If I
can't get those from EPEL or rpmforge or wherever,  I'm willing to
build those packages.

I'm offering to share that back to you, but if you don't need it, that's fine.

pj




>
> For more cutting edge, there's Fedora; bleeding edge is more like
> Ubuntu or Gentoo, but AFAIK that's pretty much it.  Most of the other
> distributions lag behind a little or a lot, depending on which one you
> choose.
>
> Now if you want truly bleeding edge software for your computer, and
> you don't mind massive numbers of security holes and other bugs,
> there's always Window$!  ;^)
>
> mhr
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-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas



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