I would be interested in a contribution to help support this effort. We have a number of SL 6.9 boxes, we would stay there for a while as all of our cad tools work. There are some things it doesn't have but we have never noticed them because they are not useful in the the day to day running of a Business.
There are a number of SL 7.6 systems in lab but they are used for special tasks that require more modern libs. Such as the TI SW development tools. Its interesting that VariCAD installs and runs on these systems and they do not need special versions of lib to run. Do they know something other developers don't. Maybe. We support special machine we manufactured over the last 25 years. How we do this is to have VMWare and run the OS's back to the dos days and compilers and design tools we used then. When you use these systems it what they can do. Ever try windows 2000 professional on a really fast system. In 20 years we have been digging our OS hole deeper and deeper and accomplishing less and less. The evaluation criteria must change, it should be faster and do things simply - just new is a defect in judgement. We evaluated Cent 8 and got no where. It would not run our 25 year collection of scripts, or any of our new cad tools. In fact nothing would run. Basically useless pile of code. Another IBM blunder. All they can talk about is packages, packages, packages and nothing useful. We counted the number of mouse click to do a simple jobs and it was alarming. People can have repedative motion injuries. This has a serous impact on our workers Comp bill. Maybe RH 9 will junk the desk top and move on to something a person can use. The other bitch is the basic redesign of the UNIX file system and start / stop functions. The system-bla bla bla stuff is hard to remember and takes too much time to look up every time something needs to be restarted. The ICON Cheese was pretty good - I though is was add for Wetconsone orr ??? - The logic escaped me. If you are using it as an electronic typwriter and spread sheet it works but if you need to do anything creative it just stands in your way. Widnow 10 is moron aware and causes my neurons to rebel and RH is moving in that direction. At some point the Industrial / Scientific OS must diverge for the telephone mentally. New linux version are being continually evaluated and most last 10 minutes into evaluation before me give them a thumbs down, some are cute but eyecandy does not make it when you need to get things done. Larry Linder