would you go "unstable" in a production environment?

garba · 12-31-2005, 07:41 AM

Good day, I have to setup linux on about 15 pc's which are to be used mainly for word processing and basic internet tasks suchs as email'ing and the like, sarge could be an option but it doesn't come with the latest release of openoffice (mandatory), not to mention kde, lagging happily behind, stuck on version 3.3... I am running debian unstable on my home pc with kde 3.5 from alioth and it works great, but you never can tell what the guys down at the sid repos are up to

Could somebody with some prior experience please give me his valuable feedback? Thanks in advance!

HappyTux · 12-31-2005, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by garba

Good day, I have to setup linux on about 15 pc's which are to be used mainly for word processing and basic internet tasks suchs as email'ing and the like, sarge could be an option but it doesn't come with the latest release of openoffice (mandatory), not to mention kde, lagging happily behind, stuck on version 3.3... I am running debian unstable on my home pc with kde 3.5 from alioth and it works great, but you never can tell what the guys down at the sid repos are up to

Could somebody with some prior experience please give me his valuable feedback? Thanks in advance!

You could try Sarge with backports of the packages you want like at this site. It only has the KDE 3.5 and a few others so you would have to track down a site for OO, I would try a test install on one of the machines and see how it works for you and go from there.

farslayer · 12-31-2005, 01:21 PM

I'll second the backports option..

I run Sid at home, but at the office I only run stable..

h2gofast · 01-01-2006, 09:29 AM

I should mention that I don't work in IT and I'm not an expert, but I have been running debian for a few years now, and Linux for a little longer than that. i.e. all my boxes are for personal use.
I have always run sid. Before sarge went stable, unstable was pretty good. I had a few hiccups but never had one showstopper between a laptop a desktop and a home server dishing out music and movies. After sarge went stable, well, it's been a learning experience. Once, yaird was updated the same day the kernel was, leaving two machines unbootable. I had to revert to earlier kernel version. I've had issues with Xorg locking up. At another point I couldn't enable dma. All issues required some time googling and got solved.
This is fine for a home setup. If my comp is unusable or sluggish for a day or so until I can pay attention to the problem, it's not the end of the world, I just can't email lovenotes to my gf. In a production environment where my job depended on stability, I wouldn't touch sid.

garba · 01-05-2006, 10:02 AM

Thanks a lot for all your replies! I think I'll go either with Sarge (which is rock solid and fully customizable) or Ubuntu.