On 04/08/10 07:21, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
My take on it is that while it's always a good idea to be using a
current install medium, with Arch it only matters that your system is
able to become current via update. The release of a new install set in
itself should never be a reason to reinstall a working system.
Good description (although I'm willing to bet there's some little bit of
unimportant cruft on a system originally installed several years ago,
due to various organizational updates, in addition to you as admin
forgetting which files you've left around in /etc...)
All I know for sure is that while Arch takes a bit more work to get a
running desktop system than some other distros, The idea of not having
to start from scratch every 6 months makes it "way worth it..."
if you don't mind running old versions of software... which I do...
there are always the distros with longer release cycles (some people
even run Ubuntu 8.04 (Long-Term-Support release) on their desktop still.
Although I think I'd pick Debian in that case.)
I've learned that if I can only find the right wiki entry, there is
usually a good comprehensive walk through of whatever I need to do to my
system. And this way, I wind up with a better understanding of my system.
oh indeed! Over the years, the Gentoo wiki has been a pretty good
source of info too (whatever distro you're on), and even the Ubuntu wiki
has some nice info for specific hardware (MacBooks at least), etc. Arch
has a pretty good wiki now also!
So as long as the rolling release process turns out to be consistently
more reliable than updating a 'buntu system to the next release {by
editing the sources list and doing an "apt-get dist-upgrade" (2 out of 5
such upgrades really hosed my my 'buntu installs...)}
You did it wrong, according to Ubuntu documentation. Ubuntu (unlike
Debian) (well, I'm not sure about ubuntu-server...) only supports the
GUI update manager as an update path (I believe it does a few more
things than a mere dist-upgrade, depending on the particular upgrade;
and by not doing those things, you're asking for trouble...). On the
other hand, I can't vouch for the official upgrade path being terribly
reliable (I usually reinstalled in a separate partition because there
was no way to roll back on the same partition if the new release had
different hardware problems that I didn't yet figure out how to solve).
-Isaac
