On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 11:40:09AM +0100, John Lewis wrote: > On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:34:05 +0100 > David Ramsden <da...@0wned.it> wrote: > > Unfortunately the package is provided by a 3rd party vendor, via > > their own repository. > > > > The latest major release of the package is Ubuntu only. I could > > probably download the .deb and get it to work but then I may run the > > risk of hitting a bug and the answer being "it's because you're not > > running Ubuntu". > > > > The reason behind this is because the product can also run as a > > virtual appliance using VMware. I've been told that Debian is no > > longer VMware certified but Ubuntu is. Therefore the software vendor > > has decided to ditch Debian with newer versions of their product. > > This make me fume! Ubuntu is "supposed" to be a derivative of Debian > and packages developed by Ubuntu developers were "supposed" to be > compatible with the parent distro or at least passed back to Debian to > be made compatible (/me simplifies a bit) > > so is ubuntu now officially a fork of Debian?
No, I'm sure Ubuntu are still passing their package changes back to Debian, and both distributions are working together to avoid significant drift. However, they *are* subtly different beasts at the point of release, and do throw up different behaviours in the odd corner cases -- which is usually where you need the support. > as for Debian being no longer 'VMware certified' I cannot find > anything regarding this via googling. Debian Lenny with the gnome > desktop certainly has VMware tools and this URL suggests a way around > one problem found in upgrading from Etch to Lenny There's a difference between "works with VMWare" (as I'm sure it does magnificently), and "certified by VMWare, Inc for use in VMWare", which means that they've spent a significant amount of time in integrating and stress-testing the combination of the VMWare environment running Ubuntu as a guest (and probably a host as well -- I don't know what the certification covers, exactly). They have probably done this with RHEL as well, but I would guess not any others. Having this certification means that VMWare have a significant belief that they have the in-house expertise and knowledge to solve any problems that their paying customers might have. I would suspect that they have far more customers paying for support running Ubuntu than they do running Debian, and that it's not economic for them to do all of that work for Debian as well. They probably have far more customers running RHEL than they do Ubuntu, too, so the fact that they explicitly support *any* .deb-based distribution is a minor miracle in its own right... > > The boxen have been running for nearly a year and there wasn't the > > need to upgrade. Upgrading means some downtime which wasn't an option > > either. Luckily I now have a window where I can upgrade or re-install > > as it looks like I'll be doing. > > I have done debian upgrades without even having to reboot! > > but usually an upgrade includes a newer kernel so a reboot is then > needed to take advantage of whatever enhancements the newer kernel > provides. Any significant upgrade risks some degree of failure of the system, regardless of how often it goes right. I recently upgraded a web server at work from Debian 4.0 to 5.0, and *almost* everything worked. I was left with several broken websites that needed manual fixes. If the system is important to the business and has no spare (for a phased migration or trial upgrade), it's frequently not worth the risk to do the upgrade. Hugo. -- === Hugo Mills: h...@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk === PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk --- It used to take a lot of talent and a certain type of --- upbringing to be perfectly polite and have filthy manners at the same time. Now all it needs is a computer.
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