Wal-Mart shipping PCs with Lindows preinstalled

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tia Haenni [mailto:thaenni at kc.rr.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 9:35 AM
> To: KC LUG
> Subject: Re: Wal-Mart shipping PCs with Lindows preinstalled
> 
> 
[... skip intro ...]
> 
> So, moving right along, if I have RH 7.2, has anyone tried RH 
> 7.3 and can you tell me why I should move up to it? <Newbie 
> question>....How does it work when you reinstall Linux, do 
> you "upgrade" the OS, uninstall the old OS and install the 
> new or what? TX

First off, if you are happy with the way it is working and
you can do everything you want to do don't upgrade. Secondly,
you can upgrade pieces or the entire OS. Redhat has an update program 
that should be fairly easy to use to keep your system up to date.
I do have two caveats, upgrading the kernel with these programs
has not been historically stable (at least for me). Upgrading KDE and/or
Gnome, same caveat. Other than that, I have found that pulling down and
installing the bugfixes and security fixes is sufficient for most users.
This doesn't include masochistic geeks such as myself who do not know
when to leave well enough alone. Eventually you will need to upgrade the
entire OS, because the latest greatest application you want to install
is
giving you a zillion dependency errors. This is the nice thing about
gentoo,
I would like to see a port of the portage system for other
distributions. Or 
make RPM more portage like. I like being able to say install this
application
and have it just install it and any needed support programs, regardless
of how 
many applications need to be installed also. Hopefully RedHat will get a
clue here.
I haven't seen RedHat 7.3 and don't use 7.2 so cannot offer concrete
input on said.

Brian