Re: questions about the right system...

Hi Adam,

>> Yeah, but I got debian and need .deb packages.
>> And I do not want to fiddle around with setting up other systems or a
>> complete new install.
>>

> Ok,  although I don't understand this attitude.  The point of a system
> is to run applications [it is about the applications],  loyalty to a  
> OS
> or distribution of an OS doesn't make allot of sense to me.  The point
> of the OS is to facilitate the system to run the application.

we've got the same problem here. And we run an outdated OGo version on  
an outdated distro because of this.

It's not about attidute. It's about running more than one service on  
more than one machine at an institution.

Our example: we're a university chair. About 20 users, that have  
access to the groupware, about 60 users in total. We're running a  
number of desktop machines and a cluster with a big number of CPUs for  
scientific calculations. The services that we have to provide to our  
users currently are NIS, NFS, SMB, we run a content manangement  
system, a wiki, IBM TSM backup and archiving, cluster and overall  
resource monitoring (with cacti and ganglia), SVN and the groupware.

All machines are updated just by centrally modifying a package list  
and pushing it with pkgsync.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/de/hardy/pkgsync

Cou can imagine that it's not suitable to run a different distro for  
every purpose. In the contrary, we're busy enough to run x86 and AMD64  
versions of Ubuntu in the same network. Just because it's not easy to  
keep the working environment homogenous.

Now, since installing OGo on Ubuntu is not that straight forward as  
typing 'aptitude install', we run a single machine with a different  
distro just for the groupware. This is not our choice and we don't  
like it; keeping a single distro up-to-date would be a lot less  
hassle, less error-prone, more secure [think security updates]. Also,  
we're glad that all other services we offer don't require their own  
distro ... which would require more server machines.

Just my two cents,
Mark

-- 
Mark Asbach
Institut für Nachrichtentechnik, RWTH Aachen University
http://www.ient.rwth-aachen.de/cms/team/m_asbach