Re: Debian-edu/Skolelinux and Edubuntu cooperation
On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 12:57:24PM +0100, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> On Fri, 13 May 2005, Markus Gamenius wrote:
>
> > >Would it be at all possible for a semi-official debian-edu/skolelinux
> > >backports archive to exist for this?
>
> > This approach would not help us keeping up with hardware, just some
> > programs.
>
> I presume that the major issue with hardware is the installer. An extra
> APT source won't really help that. Hardware problems with initial
> installation would likely be with new disk controllers, network cards and
> possibly video cards. For a novice, if the cd doesn't have support they
> might as well forget it. They really need a cd that has this stuff.
I thought that the new Debian Installer is modular, allowing for
things like additional-drivers-on-a-floppy (Hmm, any done win2K
install on a SATA drive recently... kinda hurts when the new PC
doesn't have a floppy). Even if this is a PITA, the modular nature
_should_ mean creating new install CD's with additional drivers is
relatively painless.
> A second aspect of hardware is that of thin/half-thick clients. An APT
> source with a newer version of LTSP or Lessdisks, or a new kernel for them
> etc might be a help. The nature of thin clients is often that they aren't
> usually that new so I suspect this is not so important (although the X
> Server in LTSP 3 is very old now).
In my experience, thin clients are hugely varied... you use whatever
you can lay your hands on; old, new, middling, with no two the same.
This makes hardware support doubly hard...
> My intention in saying this was not so much to propose a solution to the
> hardware problem as to show that there are one or two things other than
> hardware which cause issues when out of date and to suggest a possible
> solution to those.
I noticed the deathly silence to my "upgrades are inevitable; face it"
post... but the reality is, any "stable release" is going to need
regular updates, or will rapidly become so stale it is unusable. The
staler it is, the harder the next "upgrade" is too. This is the
problem, for hardware and software.
--
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Donovan Baarda http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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