There's no fixed answer to your question. If there is one, it's this:
Whatever members of the community step forward to provide
though for the last 4 or so years another answer has been
Each Ubuntu LTS release, sooner or later
If it really tickles your fancy, and you have hardware that is
compatible, then you can still download the emc 2.1 releases for
Ubuntu 5.10 "breezy badger" and they'll work just as well as they always
have.
On the other hand, we sometimes find that we cannot continue to support
old distributions without making bad compromises (for instance, hostmot2
won't work on Ubnutu 5.10 because the realtime kernel of that vintage
lacks support for 'request_firmware()', but being able to choose a
firmware at runtime is a very important element of hostmot2). Not to
mention that Ubuntu 5.10 is so old that nobody is offering up patches to
keep emc2 running on it. It's really when there's no longer an active
advocate of a previously-supported operating system release that we stop
trying to make new versions of emc2 work there.
For that reason, there's a (fairly slow) requirement to upgrade to new
distributions when upgrading to new feature releases of emc2.
But this thread is not precisely about running new emc on old
distributions, it's just as much about the idea that each new version of
Ubuntu is becoming less suitable for running realtime software, or for
running on low-end hardware. This may be true, though the Ubuntu
developers are probably making very reasonable decisions if their goal
is to create a good desktop and server distribution.
For instance, we have seen that many accelerated OpenGL drivers lead to
unacceptable latencies when the requirement is sub-10µs jitter. But
this latter requirement is totally irrelevant to a standard desktop
system. There's no reason that Ubuntu shouldn't make accelerated OpenGL
a requirement in their new desktop systems, but that item alone might
make emc essentially broken for a large swath of its users.
As I see it, what we have gained from Ubuntu in the past is a system
that:
* is usable both as a standard desktop system and as a
CNC control (at the same time!)
* uses debian-based software packaging
* receives security updates for 3-5 years
* works on a fairly wide range of machines
* can run "live" or install to a hard drive
* can easily be set up as a development environment for emc2
* fits on a single piece of standard CDR media
I would be sad to give up any of these features (though Ubuntu 12.04
will reportedly give up on fitting on one CD, so already we stand to
lose on that score)
There have been a few efforts to make a non-Ubuntu-based distribution
for emc2. I recall two, one based on Puppy Linux and the other based on
DSL (Damn Small Linux). However, these failed in many respects. The
worst aspects were that they did not have security updates, and that
they were difficult (or impossible) to set up as as emc development
environments--building a new version of emc2 (or anything else) involved
building a new CD image on a regular Linux system, and upgrading an
installed version involved deleting all customized files in the system
including emc2 configurations. They were also nearly useless as
desktops, because they only included non-standard or very old web
browsers. For these reasons, they are not of any practical use.
On the other hand, contributor Acemi has in the past posted very
thorough instructions on our wiki that explain step by step how to get
emc2 running on various versions of Debian. Debian has many of the
features we want (software packaging and updates) and also has leaner
installation requirements compared to Ubuntu's standard desktop. If you
want to install emc2 on a low-spec machine, then my recommendation would
be to learn enough Linux to follow these instructions (which
unfortunately have not been updated since before Debian 6.0 was
released, so now they're a bit outdated).
This hasn't even touched on the trade-offs inherent in this little
bullet item:
* works on a fairly wide range of machines
Two major trade-offs are: SMP vs UP and 32-bit vs 64-bit. For our
distribution based on Ubuntu 8.04, we opted for UP and 32-bit and later
on offered a SMP 64-bit version (without corresponding live CD). For
10.04, we opted for SMP and 32-bit--and based on the lack of feedback
about the 64-bit version, we didn't offer a 64-bit version again.
The SMP version actually works on single-threaded CPUs, but requires a
hardware feature called "APIC". Information on the internet indicated
that Microsoft made APIC a requirement for receiving the Windows logo in
2001, so we judged that this would not be problematic. However, the
difficulties encountered by our users indicate that this may have been
the wrong decision.
In 2012, what decision should we make? Should we make it with 2000
hardware in mind? 2008? 2012? 2014? It's a tough call to make,
especially when we'll probably test on less than a dozen machines before
committing to a course that we'll have to follow over the next 2+ years.
While I'm at it, I should throw in my thanks to those who have
worked on our distributions over the years: Chris Radek, Alex Joni and
Moses McKnight (did I forget anyone?). And thanks in advance to whoever
steps up to the plate this time around and has to make these decisions
and do the actual, tedious and time-consuming job of configuring
kernels, building CD images, and the like.
Jeff
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure
contains a definitive record of customers, application performance,
security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this
data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d
_______________________________________________
Emc-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
