[LON-CAPA-admin] upgrading from version 2.6.3

[Stuart Raeburn]

Paul,

>> I agree that frequently-updated distros are a huge headache to  maintain,

Yes, that is the significant point here.

Historically we have seen that Fedora installations running LON-CAPA  
tend not to keep up with the Fedora project's policy of putting a new  
release out every 6 months, and also limiting support for any  
particular release to 13 months.  Equally, LON-CAPA releases were out  
of sync with Fedora releases in recent months until support was added  
for Fedora 10, 11, and 12 with this week's 2.9.0 release.

Gerd's characterization of certain distros (e.g., Ubuntu) as being fun  
and user-friendly desktop systems does not tell the whole story.  As  
you mention LTS (Long Term Support) versions of Ubuntu are available,  
and the support extends to 5 years for the Server version.  The LTS  
server versions of Ubuntu are the ones for which LON-CAPA support is  
being made available.

> Stuart did some work on Debian and Ubuntu, and got things running.

As announced at this year's LON-CAPA conference, LON-CAPA 2.10  
(scheduled for release at the start of August) will be supported on  
Debian 5 and Ubuntu LTS.  In fact LON-CAPA 2.9 already runs on Debian  
5 and Ubuntu LTS (6.06 and 8.04), and the necessary  
loncapa-prerequisites.deb packages (as well as additional .deb  
packages for dependencies unavailable from standard repos) have been  
created.  However, installation instructions need to be prepared, and  
the corresponding apt repos need to be deployed on install.loncapa.org  
before this support becomes official.  Support for Ubuntu 10.04 will  
also be added in due course.

Over the years there have been a number of inquiries from LON-CAPA  
users about support for Ubuntu, including offers to test out  
installation of LON-CAPA once Ubuntu support is available.

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group

Quoting Gerd Kortemeyer <korte at lite.msu.edu>:

> Hi,
>
> On May 27, 2010, at 12:07 PM, Paul Omernik wrote:
>
>>
>> I agree that frequently-updated distros are a huge headache to   
>> maintain, I still have much greater (day-to-day) familiarity with   
>> Debian-based linux, and Canonical's LTS security update support for  
>>  servers is five (!) years, which, I believe, is unmatched in the   
>> Linux world.  Additionally, 10.04 LTS was 'just' released, and is   
>> will be supported until April 2015.
>
> Yes, Ubuntu *Server* looks promising.
>
> Stuart did some work on Debian and Ubuntu, and got things running.   
> However, it is hard to keep track of so many different   
> distributions, and we certainly are not equally familiar with all of  
>  them. Now, folks who have greater familiarity with certain   
> distributions might in the future want to become the sponsor of our   
> respective install packages (hint, hint).
>
> - Gerd.
>
>
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