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
