Where to get off on the Linux Bandwagon

[Netopia]

Hey Guys,

I've been thinking about this for a while and I don't have any good feel for an answer.

Originally my problem was with nVidia video drivers... I'd go through all the crap necessary to get the drivers to work in accelerated mode, and then as soon as there would be a kernal update I'd have to do it all over again. Eventually I just decided to give up and not do 3D stuff in Linux. It's been a couple of years, so perhaps that issue has gotten better. Please enlighten me if anyone knows.

More currently the issue is with releases. For instance... I've got a box that I had RedHat 9 on. I finally upgraded it to FC1 and redid the entire box. When FC2 came out I wanted to go to that but was loathe to completely rebuild everything. I generally don't like to do upgrade installs (bad MS experiences) but was encouraged to do it for FC2 and everything has worked fine. But then I went to do FC3 and it just gets TONS of errors trying to do an upgrade install, so after a few aborted attempts and reading on the net of other people with similar experiences, I decided that I'll have to start from scratch and redo the whole machine and all the software... but now I see that FC4 is right around the corner and that bunches of other FC's will be coming in fairly rapid succession over then next few years if everything goes right.

WHERE DO YOU STOP? At what point should one say "I'm staying where I am regardless of what's new" or "I'm not upgrading until (X) happens". How does one know whether a major release is even worth upgrading to? I've got a friend who is still running RH 7.3 and does ALL SORTS of stuff with his box and gets his updates a couple times per week... so now I'm wondering about what I really even get from upgrading at all!

Help... I'm lost in a sea of confusion!!! (sort of)

Joe

 

[n0cmonkey]

I like to test beta releases, so every 6 months or so I'll upgrade more often. Then I'll generally stick with one for a while. Right now I'm using a beta release of OpenBSD 3.6. I'm planning on upgrading to a snapshot sometime, but I'm in no rush.

Debian would probably be the easiest to keep up to date though.

 

[Hyperblaze]

The trick is....find a distro which allows you to do updates very easily....

The only distros I currently have installed are arch linux and gentoo. They allow for very easy updateing. I wouldn't touch redhat unless my job dependent on it. (horrible experience with redhat 9)

Other distros now are easier to update then they used to be. You no longer have to download newer isos. Just go to package manegement or update.

However, like anything, if you want to keep on top of security issues, update is a necessaity.

Humans are not perfect so until a system system can be devised without interference from a human being....then no system is perfect

 

[Nothinman]

For nVidia 3D I just use the Debian kernel tools and the nvidia-kernel-source package, whenever I build a new kernel with make-kpkg I just make a new module to match and everything is happy.

Personaly, I never stop because I run Debian sid. Sid will never be released so packages are just upgraded one by one (or in large chunks for things like Gnome) so it's essentially a rolling, current distribution. As for RH/Fedora, I have no idea, I tend to stay away from that.

 

[Abix]

Gentoo is so sexy. I love it.

 

[Nothinman]

Gentoo is so sexy. I love it.

Yea, watching all that output from gcc is killer...

 

[Infohawk]

It's a tough question and one of the reasons I switched back to windows after a year with Debian.

First of all, if this is a worry I recommend against distros where daily upgrading is possible (like Debian unstable/testing and Gentoo). Stuff breaks (well I haven't used gentoo but I've heard people saying it does once and a while and I believe it). That sais I knew a guy who used Debian unstable but simply did not upgrade unless he had a security concern or a specific thing he really needed. I could never control myself from upgrading though and things would break and I'd have to waste time fixing them.

I think a good middle-ground is to use a distro that releases every six months. That particular setup will hopefully have been tested and you could even skip the next release if you wanted to. I've heard bad things about upgrading these kinds of distros, but why not just keep your home directory on another partition and wipe and reinstall the other partitions. Your personal settings should be intact and you won't have to worry about upgrade cruft.

 

[MNKyDeth1]

Most of the others that already posted are exactly correct in using a distro that can update itself while never needing to DL a new .iso

Imo, the best distro is Arch Linux for this purpose. Gentoo is ok here but it has that very rare but can happen broken thing going on. Granted Arch can aswell, but, it pulls from one central repos and nothing else. Other distro's pull from several repos and such and those are the ones that really break during updates.

Imo, never use more than one repos. Especially if a duplicate package can be found in a different repos chances are it is built differently and will or may conflict with the main package/repos.

In this regard I give Arch the upper hand over gentoo cause who really wants to sit and watch all there crap compile? Why not just DL it and be done with it and stay on the bleeding edge. Debian of any flavor is nowhere near Arch's updatedness and there are sometimes even newer packages on Arch than there are on gentoo. I see them flip flop with the newer packages usually.

 

[Abix]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Gentoo is so sexy. I love it.

Yea, watching all that output from gcc is killer...

Agreed. I love just watching that stuff scroll all over my screen for hours upon hours!

Its almost orgasmic.

 

[Netopia]

I want to be sure that I'm understanding people correctly.

There are versions of linux out where you can upgrade to a newer version without ever doing an install... just download an update and it does it automaticly? I'm not talking about just a new kernel release, like going from something like kernel 2.6.8 to kernel 2.6.10, but about upgrading to a new release of the distro itself... like going from (for instance) Mandrake 9 to Mandrake 9.2 without ever downloading and buring ISO's or going through an upgrade install of the OS.

So... do I understand this to be a reality? Just want to make sure that I'm not reading things wrong.

Joe

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Netopia
I want to be sure that I'm understanding people correctly.

There are versions of linux out where you can upgrade to a newer version without ever doing an install... just download an update and it does it automaticly? I'm not talking about just a new kernel release, like going from something like kernel 2.6.8 to kernel 2.6.10, but about upgrading to a new release of the distro itself... like going from (for instance) Mandrake 9 to Mandrake 9.2 without ever downloading and buring ISO's or going through an upgrade install of the OS.

So... do I understand this to be a reality? Just want to make sure that I'm not reading things wrong.

Joe

You are understanding correctly.

 

[MNKyDeth1]

Yes, you are correct. With Arch you can download the 0.5 iso and update it to the 0.7 iso with just updating it. Same with gentoo in this respect.

Technically a distro like Arch or gentoo all you have to do is download one iso. The only and main reason they release new iso's is to support new hardware that might have come out. if you have a problem installing Arch with 0.5 try 0.6 if that doesn't cut it try 0.7. Each release is newer and comes with newer kernels, hence it supports newer hardware from the iso.

But, if you install with 0.5 or 0.6 all you have to do is type pacman -Syu in a term and you'll be at 0.7. Now that some time has passed you will also get all the updates to 0.7 aswell. As they release more updates just pacman -Syu and it'll just keep updating you.

Technically you could install from the 0.1 iso of Arch and pacman -Syu and be fully updated to 0.7. The same applies with gentoo i do beleive as gentoo is source so you compile everything and Arch is package based.

 

[Nothinman]

hat sais I knew a guy who used Debian unstable but simply did not upgrade unless he had a security concern or a specific thing he really needed. I could never control myself from upgrading though and things would break and I'd have to waste time fixing them.

I upgrade fairly frequently (2 or so times a week) and I can't remember the last time something broke that wasn't my fault. Of course I have apt-listbugs installed and I put off the upgrade if the bugs look like they might affect me.

Debian of any flavor is nowhere near Arch's updatedness

Like what? The only thing Debian currently has lagging is X because they're waiting for the sarge release before they push X.org.

 

[Infohawk]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

hat sais I knew a guy who used Debian unstable but simply did not upgrade unless he had a security concern or a specific thing he really needed. I could never control myself from upgrading though and things would break and I'd have to waste time fixing them.

I upgrade fairly frequently (2 or so times a week) and I can't remember the last time something broke that wasn't my fault. Of course I have apt-listbugs installed and I put off the upgrade if the bugs look like they might affect me.

Debian of any flavor is nowhere near Arch's updatedness

Like what? The only thing Debian currently has lagging is X because they're waiting for the sarge release before they push X.org.

Yes. The breakage must have been all my fault. :roll: Anyway, like nothinman said there are bugs. So unless you want to monitor the kabillion packages for bugs before you do an apt-get upgrade (and that really takes away from the ease of upgrades), there is going to be breakage. For the record I did use apt-listbugs for a while but it was irritating.

When I was using Debian, it took forever for new kde and gnome versions to even get into unstable. Maybe it's changed though.

 

[Nothinman]

Yes. The breakage must have been all my fault

I never said all of it was, but can you say beyond a shadow of a doubt that none of it was?

Anyway, like nothinman said there are bugs.

There are always bugs. I believe RH had updated packages for their last release of RHEL the same day as the release, using another distro won't help you avoid bugs and IME Debian has less bugs overall because they support more architectures so more obscure things come out and get fixed quicker.

So unless you want to monitor the kabillion packages for bugs before you do an apt-get upgrade

Or not be an idiot and install apt-listbugs so that it tells you what packages have open bugs before you upgrade them, like I said I do.

For the record I did use apt-listbugs for a while but it was irritating.

How so? All it does is say "These packages have open bugs, are you sure you want to update?" And it even gives you the bug # so that you can paste it into bugs.debian.org directly to see the conversation about the bug.

When I was using Debian, it took forever for new kde and gnome versions to even get into unstable. Maybe it's changed though.

It depends on a lot of things how fast things get in, but really who cares? Most of the changes in KDE and Gnome these days are in the background for supporting thing like HAL and D-BUS, a while back whenever Gnome 2.8 got pushed into sid the only reason I noticed was because it was mentioned on some website, I had to open up nautilus and hit Help->About to see which version I had.

 

[uOpt]

Netopia, you were really unlucky to hit the most agressively upgrading distribution of them all.

If you are computer-savy try Gentoo or FreeBSD 4.x, which have much more controlled rides than Fedora which pushes all the newest stuff in right away.

If you are not intol controlling yoour stuff rightly but want a nicer ride try Mandrake.

 

[Infohawk]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I never said all of it was, but can you say beyond a shadow of a doubt that none of it was?

I didn't write the code. I'm a user. I don't think users should be expected to know if packages have bugs before they install them. So from that standpoint I don't think the breakage was my point.

And I think checking each bug report is irritating. That's just my opinion. If the OP wants to check for bugs for every package before upgrading I guess it won't be a big deal for him. I'd rather have something different on my workstation that will have other people checking the bugs.

Who cares about have recent packages? It depends. Sometimes there are new features I want to use. Sometimes it's having the latest and greatest without having to resort to experimental. Just my preference.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't think users should be expected to know if packages have bugs before they install them

That's part of running sarge or sid, both are unreleased so far and should be considered "beta". Personally, I find them to be as stable or more stable than any other distro's official release and a lot more convenient.

And I think checking each bug report is irritating.

The bug reports are there for a reason and usually I only have to look at no more than 3 during an upgrade process, it's not exactly rocket science. And if you want you can just skip the upgrade for a few days, usually if the bug is real it'll be fixed in a week at the most.

If the OP wants to check for bugs for every package before upgrading I guess it won't be a big deal for him. I'd rather have something different on my workstation that will have other people checking the bugs.

It's a lot less work than a full upgrade with each release of FC.

Who cares about have recent packages? It depends. Sometimes there are new features I want to use. Sometimes it's having the latest and greatest without having to resort to experimental. Just my preference.

But the point is that Debian has the most recent packages in sid at least 90% of the time and also 90% of the time you can't tell the difference between that release and the previous release. Sure there's the random time when there's a bug fixed upstream that hasn't been packaged yet, but you have the same chance of that happening with any distribution.

 

[drag]

If you want to upgrade every day your asking for problems.

With Fedora Core, your always going to be facing problems with bugs and such. This is because it's cutting edge in current 'stablish' technology.

It's designed for enthusiests and developers. Personally I would never use Fedora Core on a production machine.

Same thing with Gentoo. I'd never use Gentoo on a 'serious' production machine. For home use it's very nice as is Fedora, and if you have a situation were you want the newest stuff and you have the time to make it all work, then that's great.

Debian Unstable is like that, too. Always upgrading. Always.

One nice thing is that they all do upgrade nicely to the newest version. Each have a acceptable way of doing it.

For Deban Unstable it's continous. For Fedora you use Anaconda (download cd and upgrade) to upgrade it, don't use apt-get or yum. Gentoo, I don't know so much. It's mostly continious.

There are things that you can do.

In Debian for instance you have Debian Testing, which is has a much smaller level of updates that Debian Unstable does. Only packages that go thru Unstable and work correctly get moved down to Testing.

That's one way.

Another is to only buy hardware that is properly supported. On a good Linux-friendly machine a real install from scratch to fully working machine maybe takes a hour of your time. There is no configuration, there is no compiling anything. There is no kernel patching or mucking around with weird crap like that. It all Just Works (tm)*
(for the most part)

Another thing you can do is use seperate /home directory. When you upgrade all you have to do then is edit out some of your preferences for newer versions of the programs (the user preferences are stored in .filename directores and files in your home directory)

So what you do is format the root partition. Install a new OS, setup your user, edit your /etc/fstab file so that your home partition gets mounted at /home/ and then
chown -R username:groupname /home/username
to get the permissions all setup.

And then everything is as it was.

Also if you just don't want to upgrade.. PERIOD and want a good stable and long-lasting setup, then there are solutions.

Just don't upgrade is one thing you can do. Fedora Core is actively supported for 3 generations and then maintained in the Fedora Legacy project for 3 more. Or something like that. (you'll want to double check this out)

So that gives you a year and a half until it goes into maintanance mode and a full 3 years until it becomes fully unsupported.

You can stick with Debian Sarge, which is currently the Testing OS. However it will eventually be made "stable" and will continue to be like that for many many years.

Beleive it or not there are still lots of people that use debian stable, and it's very old by today's standards. Hell the default kernel is still 2.2 series.

You could go with a Redhat WS install (or one of the free clones.).

Redhat garrentees it's customer that the software will be in active support and developement for a period not lasting less then 5 years. It's one of the main reasons why Redhat is used in enterprise enviroments... The level of testing that they do before releasing updates and upgrades is much higher then something like Fedora.


Personally I prefer continious upgrade. I use Debian Testing on my main machine and laptop..

(which is the best distro IMO for this sort of thing. Not the best for everybody and not the easiest to understand. I also do not upgrade on a daily basis. I upgrade once or twice a month, and I pay attention to new security advisories and upgrade when there is a serious bug fix.)

, and if I used Fedora I would upgrade with the install disks a month or two after they release a new version.

My personal experiances with upgrades between Redhat/Fedora versions have been good.

I've taken one box... A 800mhz celeron setup, and had Redhat 8 installed on that. I upgraded it to Redhat 9 when that came out, and kept on that until they released Fedora Core 2, and upgraded to that. Then now it has been upgraded to Fedora Core3.

There were some pains because I did the upgrade incorrectly (using apt-get instead of the install cds, Debian is layed out in a apt-get friendly way.. but with Fedora there are some changes between distros that they don't include with the packaging) but it wasn't that bad.

Also don't forget that there are things like FreeBSD, which tend to upgrade in a more sane fasion then most Linux distros do.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Gentoo is so sexy. I love it.

Yea, watching all that output from gcc is killer...

Now now... be nice.

 

[m3rcury]

Originally posted by: Abix

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Gentoo is so sexy. I love it.

Yea, watching all that output from gcc is killer...

Agreed. I love just watching that stuff scroll all over my screen for hours upon hours!

Its almost orgasmic.

Almost orgasmic? Man, I'm waaay past that point. I'm already taking care of my gentoo babies at this point!