On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Sean wrote: > To: centos at centos.org > From: Sean <soso at orcon.net.nz> > Subject: [CentOS] two cents or not two cents > > Hello Producers > > "Longevity of Support" is an attractive drawcard for CentOS if it means > the exact opposite of Fedora's "short support cycle" that does not > provide updating of infrastructural libraries for very long, libraries > which newer versions of applications (like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera > etc) depend on and which wont install unless the libraries are also > newer versions? But is that what it means -- ie that those > infrastructural libraries (libpango, libcairo etc) are continuously > updateable to fairly recent versions? > > If so, the problem is in reconciling that meaning with the reputation of > CentOS to only support older versions of applications (eg Firefox-1.5, > Thunderbird-1.0 etc). It does reconcile, of course, if the implications > are merely that the CentOS user must compile and install the later > versions of such applications from source, rather than having the luxury > of pre-packaged binaries. It doesn't reconcile if there is some other > critical reason why newer such applications just wont install. But which? > > I ask here because the profusion of vague mission statements and > 'target-enduser-profile' claims that litter the internet re '*nix > distros' seldom actually address those real issues. And hopefully > someone can enlighten. My complex production & developement desktop > takes months to fully port to a new OS (or OS-version), so OS updates to > get library updates (ala Fedora philosophy) becomes increasingly untenable. You might be interested in giving my ALI scripts a whirl on a spare machine (even an old laptop) to start with, so you get used to how they work. I wrote these especially to deal with doing a fresh linux installation. http://www.karsites.net/centos/anyuser/auto-linux-installer.php I can set up the services I want running in under 10 seconds. Beats sitting there doing it manually for 3 days! The general idea is that you modify the installer scripts to work with a particular system - just do it one time. Then you can replay the scripts as often as you want, to re-install your system. Please let the list know if they help with your installation/update woes. BTW. Some applications such as Firefox need to be updated to their latest versions, otherwise websites will not work with an older version. I had these issues with running an old version of FF on Fedora 8. I went from F8 to F12 using my ALI scripts without any problems. Kind Regards, Keith Roberts -- In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not. This email was sent from my laptop with Centos 5.5