On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 04:51:25PM +0000, joe golden wrote: | Debian has koffice in the testing branch>> | this may be the answer to my need for a stable word processor and graphing | spreadsheet for our small school network of 10 machines. | | Will the testing branch be so unstable as to crash regularly? I don't want | to look bad and I don't want linux to look bad.
I have testing running quite happily on my machine at home. I got it for the new GNOME. As others have said, make sure you check before upgrading. I found that xscreensave and gnome-applets disappeared when I upgraded. gnome-applets wasn't in testing at the time (it is now!) and I don't know why xscreensaver disappeared. It may also be possible for you to use stable, but download individual packages from testing to get the newer stuff you need. I did this with galeon and mozilla from sid. Also, if you are to run testing, whatever, I am sure you don't want to have to manually update each machine. The idea that I like best is diskless terminals. Get a nice fast, big machine. This machine will have all programs and data (home directories, etc). Then get some cheapo pcs with a NIC and video card so they can boot with a kernel from the server, and run all apps from the server. Then there is only 1 machine (plus a backup, I hope ;-)) to perform maintenance on. I imagine that the school already has a bunch of "overpowered" machines if they were previously using Windows, so those should work well as diskless X terms. The only concern is that the server is powerful enough to handle all the simultaneous usage. Also make sure the server doesn't have a hardware failure and a backup is available (or that the downtime is acceptable ;-)). HTH, -D
