[LON-CAPA-admin] Suse 10.2

[Stuart Raeburn]

Lars,

Typically, LON-CAPA continues to be "supported", (i.e., RPMs for any  
new packages required by new LON-CAPA versions are built and  
distributed via the corresponding LON-CAPA RPM repository) for OS  
versions a number of months after the Linux distributor has ceased  
providing security patches for a particular version.

In the case of SuSE 10.2 this means that the forthcoming 2.8 release  
will run on SuSE 10.2, despite the fact that SuSE ceased providing  
security packages on November 30th 2008.  That said, from a security  
standpoint it is always advisable to upgrade a Linux distro to a  
version for which the distributor provides security patches.  LON-CAPA  
is supported on SuSE 10.3 (which openSuSE will support until October  
31st 2009).  I know of at least one LON-CAPA domain currently running  
on SuSE 10.3.

I would anticipate that by the time of next summer's LON-CAPA 3.0  
release, LON-CAPA support for 10.1 and 10.2 will be discontinued, to  
be replaced by support for SuSE 11.0 and 11.1.

As regards LON-CAPA support for debian-based distros, in the past  
there has been some discussion about supporting these, and indeed as  
an exploratory effort a while ago I built the required .deb packages,  
and tested installation on a VM running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (32 bit).   
Continuation of this effort has not been a priority as, until now,  
this has not been requested for production servers.  I'll look at  
revisiting support for debian-based distros in advance of the summer's  
LON-CAPA 3.0 release.

Recently, a few LON-CAPA domains have migrated to CentOS 5, because  
releases of new versions are less frequent, and the distributor has a  
stated intent to provide support for several years (according to the  
CentOS wiki this distro will be supported until March 31st 2014).   
Migration between SuSE and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS distros requires  
recreating file-system authenticated users (see  
http://loncapa.org/hardwareupgrade.html).

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group


Quoting Lars Jensen <ljensen at tmcc.edu>:

> Suse 10.2 is no longer supported by the distributors. How much longer
> is it going to be supported by lon-capa?
>
> Why are debian based systems not supported? Is this coming in the future?
>
> Thanks,
> Lars.
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