On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 01:05:12PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <[email protected]> flavor, containing: > Hi.......... > > I am running successfully running xastir under VMWARE with Xubuntu 8.04 on a > laptop running Win Xp and I don't want to screw it up<grin>. > > I want to try to become more competent with linux and so am shopping for > books. Amazon has several and reading the reviews hasn't helped me a great > deal is trying select one. > > Does anyone have any suggestions?
I found "Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks" helpful when I bought my daughter her first Linux laptop. With the frequency of Ubuntu releases, though, you have to watch out for which edition you buy. By the time the book is printed, the release it documents is already out of date unless you are getting a book that describes one of the "LTS" releases. > It seems that the "current" version of xubuntu is 9.04 and there was a 8.10 > also. All the books seem to be for 8.04 or 8.10. Is there any good reason > to upgrade to 9.04? How difficult is that while trying to keep a functional > setup with xastir running? My current preference is to stick with 8.04 for a while. This is the latest "Long Term Support" (LTS) release and is very stable. It was released in April 2008 (that is what "8.04" means) and is supposed to be supported with bug fixes and security patches for three years. These patches come often, especially if you enable the "backports" repository (don't enable the "proposed" repository unless you can afford the odd breakage from updates that haven't been fully tested now and then). I make this choice because it is often the case that upgrading from one release to the next requires a big time investment to chase down changes that impact all the source-code builds I have on my systems (e.g. Xastir, GRASS, GDAL, etc.) and I don't want to spend that time every 6 months. In fact, some vendors even make the unbelievable recommendation that it is better to do a full reinstall of the new system than an upgrade --- something I would consider a completely unreasonable approach on a regular basis. All other releases are pretty much one-shot bleeding-edge releases that happen every 6 months. I choose not to chase them. Many others choose otherwise to get the benefit of newer kernels and updated third-party packages. The LTS releases pretty much get only bugfix and security patches, so if you want the bleeding edge version of The GIMP or Compiz or GNOME or whatever, then you want the latest Ubuntu release. If you're like me and value long-term stability of your working platforms, you might choose to stick with 8.04 until the next LTS release comes out (which will probably be 11.04). HTH. -- Tom Russo KM5VY SAR502 DM64ux http://www.swcp.com/~russo/ Tijeras, NM QRPL#1592 K2#398 SOC#236 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. -- Ineffective daily affirmation _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
