Re: how stable is the testing branch?
On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 04:51:25PM +0000, joe golden wrote:
| Debian has koffice in the testing branch>>
| this may be the answer to my need for a stable word processor and graphing
| spreadsheet for our small school network of 10 machines.
|
| Will the testing branch be so unstable as to crash regularly? I don't want
| to look bad and I don't want linux to look bad.
I have testing running quite happily on my machine at home. I got it
for the new GNOME. As others have said, make sure you check before
upgrading. I found that xscreensave and gnome-applets disappeared
when I upgraded. gnome-applets wasn't in testing at the time (it is
now!) and I don't know why xscreensaver disappeared. It may also be
possible for you to use stable, but download individual packages from
testing to get the newer stuff you need. I did this with galeon and
mozilla from sid.
Also, if you are to run testing, whatever, I am sure you don't want to
have to manually update each machine. The idea that I like best is
diskless terminals. Get a nice fast, big machine. This machine will
have all programs and data (home directories, etc). Then get some
cheapo pcs with a NIC and video card so they can boot with a kernel
from the server, and run all apps from the server. Then there is only
1 machine (plus a backup, I hope ;-)) to perform maintenance on. I
imagine that the school already has a bunch of "overpowered" machines
if they were previously using Windows, so those should work well as
diskless X terms. The only concern is that the server is powerful
enough to handle all the simultaneous usage. Also make sure the
server doesn't have a hardware failure and a backup is available (or
that the downtime is acceptable ;-)).
HTH,
-D
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