As we know, there will be no SL8. There will be an internal CERN-Fermilab CentOS 8 (CF8 for this discussion) distro, presumably limited to use at the two facilities and to the collaborations that are allowed to get the distro under the collaboration contract(s). As I am no longer a member of the HEP community, I presume I cannot get the internal (by Fermilab/CERN) support (as we get on this list from Fermilab paid professional personnel), but (as required by the GPL and other licenses) any modifications in source form to produce whatever the CF8 version is -- if one really can build from such "source" (a very complicated and time consuming endeavor requiring test platforms for the build -- not production platforms). Thus, I am looking for alternatives.

Under the current regulations from the university at which both myself and my wife are tenured full professors, all courses for the new term will be "on line" with a specification to use Zoom through the campus Blackboard system. I will not go into the real implications of this edict in terms of required security or throughput to divers platforms and environments being used by students located afield. Because her class has an enrollment of ten students (mine regrettably are *MUCH* larger), and because the university IT division claims it can support bi-direction simultaneous realtime video/audio under Zoom for all students/TAs/professors in each class (a "virtual" class equivalent to a physical class at one location), my wife needed a new computer. She diverted some of her internal research funds for that purpose; after budgetary considerations from the College budget person (the University is made up of Colleges for the academic side), and after i did some research, I settled on a Dell Inspirion 7191 two-in-one that would allow her to "write" on the screen. This machine is claimed to be fully supported by Ubuntu 18x LTS current (I can supply the document).

This is the first machine that I personally have configured for Ubuntu LTS, and I willing to outline the details of my experience if there is interest -- beyond the very brief summary below. Suffice it to say that it "fully works" after some mucking about to find the real fix for the installed audio system. I installed MATE (my preferred desktop, and of my wife), VirtualBox (for MS Win), etc., and all of the personal files from the SL7 predecessor easily moved via an external USB hard drive to the Ubuntu 18 LTS system. These include her mozilla configurations (passwords, etc.) for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and the virtual machine used by VirtualBox. Given the various "gotchas" and utilities she needs, including fixing the sound card detection issue and giving root a real login and GUI access (not just sudo from a terminal application), it has taken me two full days -- but it does all work, and, for an end user (such as my wife) is not discernibly different from SL7 MATE (not including the touchpad and lack of actual three pointing device keys by the touchpad -- but that is hardware, not software). I do regret that she needed the machine *NOW*, and thus I will have to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.x LTS when that is in production and tested by the community. Note also that there is no equivalent to this list for Ubuntu LTS that I can find, necessitating "digging" on the web to find solutions to issues. Ubuntu claims that the migration from one major production release to the successor for LTS can be done in place without disruption -- I shall see if that is true. (I will copy all personal files to an external hard drive in case the migration "steps on things".)

I have no idea how Ubuntu LTS server will behave -- that is our next hurdle. Note that at as a server, Xwindows and a GUI does not come as part of the "base" package and will need to be installed. Despite the fact that our servers do not use GUI applications very often, there are some graphical "front ends" that make the observation of data (including system performance and issues) much more evident than strictly character based data.

As an enduser workstation, Ubuntu 18x LTS does seem to work.

To everyone:  stay safe, stay well.

Yasha Karant

Reply via email to