We have added a number of packages to SL5.10 that we use daily. The support for video drivers that had worked very well from SL 5 to SL 5.10 went broken in SL 6.2 and remain broken. It would make another popular Mother Board. Fixing this problem was real exercises to get "elrepo" down loaded and fix all new hardware systems. We have to support a bunch of "mongrel" SL 6.5 systems.
PSpice was a problem and we had to add a lot of lib's to make it function. So Far we have been able to down load a number of device spice models from Maxim and build models for some very efficient power conversion devices and a few VLF circuits for looking at electromagnetic data from storms. Maple - we have been using it for a long time to some analysis projects. We are holding our breath to see if it gets broken. Eagle - 5.11 We have not upgraded this package due to some lib issues. It seams they built it using another Linux package. This allows you to develop circuits, do a board layout and simulate its performance. They didn't use PSpice so we had to build a model conversion tool to fix some format problems. It would be helpful if we could get required libs into SL7. Word processor: It appears that the latest distributions of LibreOffice deleted the support and translation of early StarOffice files. We have been using StarOffice, openOffice, libreOffice for a long time. The splintering of the effort has not helped - its the best advertisement that M$ has for their office product. Since there is no way to contact these folks directly I thought I would publish it here. Its very evident that the authors and developers have never worked in a commercial or practical environment. When looking at our company's files on a server the StarOffice - LibreOffice is nearing 39 G. of data we access every so often. We have been looking for a scheme to bring them forward - a migration scheme but need to preserve file date internally. I have to ask this question of developers - why arbitrarily delete a capability just because of ignorance. Be you are offended look up word in dictionary. A long time ago it made sense to make a smaller foot print but now since disk storage is almost free. Pardon my rule breaking on this subject. So far we have most systems upgraded to 5.10 and a dozen 6.4 - 6.5. The SL added packages have been a real asset. I think we may be one of few commercial users. Thank You Larry Linder