Richard wrote:
On Saturday 21 August 2004 10:40 am, Jim Sabatke wrote:
I'd love to do that. As much as I love Linux, people who watch me go through constant upgrades to get new versions of software, along with all the grief involved, ask me pretty often why I put up with that. Windows users seldom need to upgrade their OS to run new software. Just try to compile or install an rpm of the latest gimp. It's an almost endless thread of library upgrades. I don't really mind doing it, but it does get annoying sometimes.
Point is, XP users generally love their systems because it's easy. Installing software is easy. They put a disk in and it does the rest. They just need to hit "next" a few times.
That said, I'm going to try to get them to setup a proper server.
Of course, I haven't discussed performance or security here.
Jim, the thing to do is setup the Linux box with a good solid version, mine is using SuSE 9.0, and simply let it work. If you have it doing all you need it to do and it does it reliably, why fool with success by doing what may be unnecessary updates? If you get your jollies doing updates then do that to another machine and dont fix the working machine.
Of course you should watch for security updates and make those as necessary but updating for fun should be limited to your 'play' machine. The old adage about don'f fix what ain't broke especially applies to a server/router/gateway.
Then you can impress your friends by telling them how long the gateway has been up without any problems at all. Richard
With a server/gateway box, that's what I've done. However, application software is rapidly changing and maturing on Linux. For example, I use gimp quite a bit and the new features are often quite desirable and worthwhile, but the upgrade path can be painful, although I do manage it. The same is true for Firefox and Thunderbird at times. Once distributions start messing with glibc, glib, gtk, etc. it can become a bit of a mess. One more example. I just installed apt-get, which I'm really impressed with. I wanted to see if an interface program wouldn't be nice, so I got the source for synaptic (no rpms for 9.0 that I could find). I then went on an journey of missing xml and other libs that finally caused me to give up, for a while at least. BTW, apt-get may be a godsend here, as it tells me what is missint far better than YaST does. -- Jim Sabatke Hire Me!! - See my resume at http://my.execpc.com/~jsabatke Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup. NOTE: Please do not email me any attachments with Microsoft extensions. They are deleted on my ISP's server before I ever see them, and no bounce message is sent.