[K12OSN] LTSP version choices

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 11:06, Bill Bardon wrote:
> I will be setting up a new installation of K12LTSP this week.  Trying to
> decide which version to install, and I can't find much info about the
> pros and cons.  Why would I choose EL over FC3 or FC4, or vice versa?
> Or, since I know Debian best, should I just install the LTSP packages
> over a Debian install?  I know Ubuntu is on the way, but not here yet.
> This is for a high school lab. Thanks for any pearls of wisdom.

Basically you should balance current features, expected stability,
and life of update support to match your needs.

FC3 and EL are about the same feature-wise but EL (and thus Centos)
is supposed to be supported for 5 years, vs. the remaining 6 months
for FC3.  FC4 should have some new things, currently not very well
tested, and about a year of support. 

K12ltsp is kind of an odd beast.  Normally you want to go for long
term support on servers because Linux server-side applications are
very mature and you don't miss much if you don't upgrade.  However,
the desktop apps are improving rapidly so you do want to stay up
to date there.  With thin-client systems the desktop runs on the
server so you may have to compromise.  RHEL (or Centos) looks good
now because it is a recent release.   But, a year or two from now
you might want to replace it with something else even though it
is still supported with bugfix updates because better versions of
the apps may become available in other distributions.  Also, older
versions of Fedora don't break just because the official update
support stops - you just have to switch to the 'legacy' support
repositories if you want any updates.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com