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. > > Unstable is "unstable" because it changes often, not because it crashes often. As a whole, woody runs very reliably. It is very unlikely that a normal user could do something accedentally that would bring a woody system to its knees, requiring a reboot.
The contents of woody changes daily, as developers squash bugs and upgrade versions, etc. Occasionaly, new bugs are introduced. Even more occasionally the new bugs are worse than the old bugs. Hence, there is more risk in tracking woody than in tracking potato. However, the risk is small, and very acceptable (to most people) if you find that you need features available in woody, but not in potato. Just because woody changes on ftp.debian.org or your friendly neighborhood mirror doesnt mean you have to install the new packages. You may wish to get your machines configured, and upgrade packages only during semester breaks. I dont know how old your machines are, but if they are "pretty old", you may wish to ensure that they have enough memory to run kde without swapping too often. I am running a fairly full gnome setup with 64 meg. It is enough, 128 would be much better. It would cost me about $10-20 to upgrade to 128, but I am not going to bother as this workstation is about to be demoted to mailserver/firewall. Mike
