Fedora Core 6 No More

[Michael Peters]

On Friday, December 21, 2007, at 08:45AM, "Paul Johnson" <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:

>I've been in this same situation and lately I've grown tired of
>constantly updating Fedora systems that, at least on the surface, seem
>to work fine.  Especially on servers, where users are using very few
>GUI programs, the update has no functional benefit.
>
>At the current time, I'm testing the longer-lived linux distributions
>on 2 machines.  Since I like the RPM system, I stayed in that family.
>I've installed CentOS5 and Scientific Linux 5. Both are offshoots of
>RedHat Enterprise Linux.
>
>On a user workstation, I do not think I would recommend this strategy
>because those distributions lag quite horribly in the introduction of
>the "creature features" of the desktop. No Gnumeric, no inkscape, old
>R, old firefox, old thunderbird, and on and on.  I started trying to
>keep track of the applications that I needed to build and or update
>for an SL5 system and it has been pretty time consuming.

I actually have gnumeric/abiword and lots of other goodies built for CentOS -

http://www.pennywasted.info/centos/yjl.php

That repo is primarily Fedora 8 packages rebuilt in mock for CentOS 5

It's not in the repo I linked above because they *replace* CentOS provided packages, but I also built FireFox 2 and Thunderbird 2 for CentOS 5 -

http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/repodata/repoview/firefox-0-2.0.0.10-3.el5_1.yjl.0.html
and
http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/repodata/repoview/thunderbird-0-2.0.0.9-1.el5_1.yjl.html

Thunderbird is a straight rebuild of the FC8 source RPM.
FireFox 2 - I made some very minor changes to the RPM spec file:
http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/src/firefox.spec.diff

Note that upgrading FireFox results a different gecko-lib.
I had to rebuild the CentOS yelp as a result -
http://yellowjacketlinux.fileburst.com/yum/yjl/el5/i386/yjl-ff2/yelp-2.16.0-15.el5_1.yjl.0.i386.rpm

It's possible there are other apps that use gecko-libs that will cause a firefox 2 upgrade conflict if installed, I haven't yet walked the CentOS repos to see what requires gecko-lib.

Anyway - if they are of any use to you, enjoy.