I am eventually going to try to install a Zimbra mail server on one of my ubuntu boxes and I was wondering what the actual difference would be if I installed Ubuntu 7.04 even though the Zimbra binary is for Ubuntu 6. Furthermore, will this make any difference for similar binaries (supposed to be for Ubuntu 6 but I'm using 7.04)?

You would have to look on the Ubuntu web site to see if they made changes that would affect that particular application.

In general I would try to use the distribution's package repository. The developers test the packages to ensure that they will work with their distribution before they put the packages into their distribution's package set. That could save you the trouble of having the wrong libraries or compiler versions.

In your case I would probably use the version of Ubuntu that the package was designed to work on. Or you could just test it out. Put both versions of Ubuntu on a disk and see what happens.

"I am eventually going to try to install a Zimbra mail server on one of my ubuntu boxes and I was wondering what the actual difference would be if I installed Ubuntu 7.04 even though the Zimbra binary is for Ubuntu 6. Furthermore, will this make any difference for similar binaries (supposed to be for Ubuntu 6 but I'm using 7.04)?"

The problem that you can run into is with Zimbra dependencies. Sometimes a package is dependent on a specific version of another package. In a hypothetical example the Zimbra version you have in binary may need helpfultools version 2.4. If Ubuntu 7.04 contains helpfultools version 2.6 then a binary of Zimbra compiled against helpfultools version 2.4 may on may not work with helpfultools version 2.6.

The surest way to solve this potential problem is to download the Zimbra source and compile it on Ubuntu 7.04. For similar binaries the solution is the same, download the source and compile it on Ubuntu 7.04.

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Steve Stites

If you're building a server, you probably would benefit from the LTS -- Long Term Support -- for 6.06.