[CentOS] To upgrade or not

[Lanny Marcus]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.


We do not have a lot of RAM in our Desktops, which are older models. Mine
has 512 MB and my daughter's has either 384 MB or 512 MB (I can't remember
and she is using it now)... However, we do have more horsepower than your
laptop. I use GNOME 99% of the time and it's running well. My box has a
Celeron 2.6 GHz and daughters box has a P4 1.6 GHz.

>
>
> 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.


I used FF2 for a few minutes, while testing a Ubuntu Live CD, before I
shipped it to a friend, Monday. From that quick test, I think FF3 is FAR
more advanced and so far I haven't seen any problems, while surfing with
FF3.

>
> 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.


Our Router/Firewall is a headless  IPCop and I will leave that one alone,
since it's working properly.

>
> 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.


Well, as you gradually update packages, if you update everything, you will
be on 5.2.  If you only update a few packages that you feel are necessary
for security, you will continue to be on 5.1.

If you can backup the data on your laptop, give it a shot. Do not upgrade
anything, without backing up. HTH
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