Leslie Katz wrote:
Thank you to those who pointed out my ^ mistake when attempting to add
individual stocks to the Gnome Stock Ticker.
Thanks also to those who referred to other applications. One of those
Gnome Stock Ticker-like applications, Invest, has requirements that my
system doesn't satisfy. For those interested, I can add a reference to
another Gnome Stock Ticker alternative called Pyt!ck. My system
doesn't satisfy its requirements either.
The fact that I can't try those alternatives leads to my supplementary
question.
I started using Linux when Fedora Core 3 was relatively new, say a
year ago. I've now got to the stage that I use Linux almost
exclusively. (I leave it for about a minute a day to update an Excel
workbook that has a chart in it that I can't convert to Linux.) The
fact that I rely on Linux for virtually everything has made me afraid
to upgrade my distribution to Fedora Core 4, even though it would
permit me to try things like Invest or Pyt!ck. I'm worried about loss
of data, about loss of settings in applications common to both 3 and 4
and about loss of applications that I've installed that weren't part
of Fedora Core 3.
In one sense, I could stay where I am forever now, since everything is
now working well, subject to trivial things like Gnome Stock Ticker
not working as I'd like. At the same time, I'd like to be able to try
out new things.
Do people have views about the harm-potential of my upgrading? Am I
right to be fearful?
If you backup and then resinstall, it should be pretty straight forward.
I have used both Core 3 and Core 4, and I would not use Core 3 again,
Core 4 really should be no problem getting all your Core 3 stuff again.
If you wanted to upgrade rather than reinstall then I would be very
reluctant to advise that. I have upgraded Ubuntu and debian between
versions with no probs at all, but when I upgraded Core 1 to Core 2 it
was a nightmare and ended up reinstalling. I thought later that they may
have got the upgrade thing sorted, so I tried a Core2 to Core3 upgrade -
again, a mess. I dont know what issues there are upgrading Core3 to Core
4, but with my experiences I most certainly would not do it. In
comparison, I have upgraded Ubuntu from Warty to Hoary to Breezy without
reinstalls.
Dont want to turn this into a distro war, but you may be interested to
know how easy Ubuntu Breezy is, aswell as how much more software I find
in the ubuntu apt repositories compared to the fedora yum repositories
(or fedora's apt).
If you want to try Ubuntu (and by all means if you like fedora then
stick with it) it is a 2 step procedure to get a desktop that has all
the functionality you could ever want. 1st do a standerd install and
update then 2nd install automatix and run the program. Automatix
downloads and installs everything you want on a desktop that a standard
ubuntu install does not include. It installs things such as flashplayer,
java runtime, nvidia drivers (if applicable), mplayer and all codecs
limewire skype, latest openoffice etc etc etc. Since I did this 2 stage
setup on one of my pc's, I have not had to add or tweak anything, its
all there and it all just works. When Dapper is officially released I
will have no fear in upgrading - just sudo apt -get dist upgrade. I
have also found harware detection far better on breezy than anything
else I have tried - not yet had a wireless lan card that did not work
out of the box, even one that didn't work with fedora (without a ton of
stuffing around).
If you dont like Brown (like me) it is very simple to change the entire
colour scheme aswell as splash screens etc.
Hope that helps, or is at least of interest, and more than anything,
please nobody think I am saying one distro is better than another, we
dont need any distro wars, Im just suggesting that perhaps, Ubuntu may
be suitable in this case. Fedora is an excellent distro, like most of
them (after all they do all use the linux kernel and gnu tools).
Tuxta2
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