[CentOS] To upgrade or not

[Michael A. Peters]

Lanny Marcus wrote:

> 
> 
> I upgraded my Desktop yesterday and my daughter's Desktop this morning. 
> If you surf the web, the move from Mozilla Firefox 1.5.x to Mozilla 
> Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 will be well worth your time. I was having problems, 
> on web sites I frequently visit, with Firefox 1.5.  CentOS 5 is based on 
> Fedora Core 6 as I recall. The difference is with CentOS you get a LONG 
> life, more stability and more security, along with super support from 
> this mailing list. I believe that Firefox 3.0 requires a bunch of other 
> stuff that is not in CentOS 5.1, to run. It took me just over an hour to 
> download all the packages for each box and about another hour to get it 
> all installed. I would suggest that: (a) You backup the data on your 
> laptop (b) login as root and do "yum upgrade" and move to CentOS 5.2.  
> If you do not upgrade everything, you will still get security updates, 
> for the packages you do want to update.

I'm already running FF2 on the laptop.
The issue is the laptop has a 700MHz CPU (550 MHz on battery) and 384MB 
of ram, and unfortunately it seems that many of the new gnome libraries 
aren't very conservative when it comes to ram and CPU, causing gnome to 
be a dog.

My only gripe with FF2 is that it has a tendency to sometimes crash when 
opening a dialog window, but I'd rather have that happen then a desktop 
that just isn't usable because of code bloat on older hardware.

My desktop is a 2.2GHz AMD X2 w/ 2GB of RAM - upgrading that to 5.2 is a 
no brainer. My LAN server is an older machine, but it's headless so I 
don't forsee an upgrade problem causing performance there either. It's 
the laptop w/ desktop performance that I'm worried about, and I'd rather 
not play around with minimal UIs that aren't well supported.

It's the desktop performance of 5.2 that I really want to know about. If 
I have to upgrade to get security patches I have to upgrade, but as long 
as 5.1 still gets security patches, then I really may consider not doing it.