I've been using SL6.0 as my primary desktop OS since about 2-3 months before 6.1 was released. i was set to do the upgrade to 6.1, but noticed that with the round of updates that came out around 6.1 release time, I was running the same kernel rev. as 6.1. Since my system has been very solid, I decided to skip the upgrade to 6.1, and haven't had any regrets.
However, since this is my primary OS, I have had to install some software that wasn't in the SL repos to meet my overall "user-experience" expectations. Mostly this has been to use newer versions than are in the repos, anyways. My general procedure has been to use the SL repos for "system-level" packages, use the EPEL repo for a few additional system-level packages, and install personal stuff as needed. Some of the stuff that I manually installed... -- Didn't install default OpenOffice, and installed LibreOffice instead -- Uninstalled OpenJDK, and replaced with OracleJDK -- Installed latest PostgreSQL instead of older repo version -- Manually download and install Adobe Flash -- I'm still running the default Firefox, but will probably manually upgrade -- I needed a newer Perl than the system install, so I used Perlbrew & ActivePerl -- Other development tools... Eclipse, Netbeans, Komodo, Jedit, etc. -- JBoss, Glassfish, VirtualBox, etc. I'm only managing this stuff for one machine, but if I were doing this for multiple machines, I'd set up a Puppet/Chef/etc. server + local repo for special packages and centrally manage everything. Comparing SL6.0 to Fedora 14, SL6 is a bit behind in some software revs. (Like Perl 5.10.1 vs 5.12.3), and there is less to choose from in the repos, but it has been, for me, very solid as a desktop OS. If you're happy with FC14, I think you'll like SL6.x. ________________________________ From: lancebaynes87 <[email protected]> To: Scientific-Linux <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2011 7:28 AM Subject: Scientific-Linux: which version has bigger support date? http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/21692/scientific-linux-which-version-has-bigger-support-date We have several Desktop PC's that has Fedora 14 installed. Great! But: We need a Linux distro that doesn't need a reinstall in ""every half year"". (no, dist-upgrade is not an option!). We found the Scientific-Linux. So according to: https://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/roadmap SOLUTION #1 if we install 6.1 with GNOME, and use it for Desktop purposes, then we will have updates until 2017-11-11. WOW!! That's more then 6 years! http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?d1=29&m1=9&y1=2011&d2=11&m2=11&y2=2017&ti=on This is f*cking great for an "enterprise". SOLUTION #2 if we install the: http://www.osst.co.uk/Download/scientific/6rolling/x86_64/iso/SL-61-x86_64-2011-07-27-Install-DVD.iso.torrent that's a "rolling release". Now I haven't used any "rolling release" based Linux distros so I don't know what that exactly means. Q: does it mean that if I install it once, then I never have to re-install it again because of a version upgrade, ex.: Scientific-Linux 7 comes out, and neither do I need to "dist-upgrade"? - Because rolling release means that there is no more version numbers?
