Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote on 06/26/2009 08:45 AM:
> On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Anatoly Solomin wrote:
>
>> I'm running SL5.3 on DELL XPS M1530 laptop. And the "Wireless 355 
>> Bluetooth"
>> does not work, though I installed the necessary software, I guess.
>>
>> All I know is that with Fedora 11, this Bluetooth on my XPS works out of
>> the box (apparently with the same suite of gnome's bluetooth 
>> software, but of
>> later version, of course).
>>
>> The question is: Can the latest version of that software suite be
>> incorporated into SL5.3 as well ?
>
> You do know that SL5 is a port of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
> which came out in parallel with Fedora Core 6 and updates like
> this are up to Red Hat not Scientific Linux ?
>
> RHEL5 + SL5 exist to provide stability over a longer time frame than 
> Fedora. It is not reasonable to expect the same bleeding edge
> functionality.
>
Yes, I'm well aware of this reasoning.

Then why Scientific Linux can't make things pragmatically clear:

   1. include in its official distribution only things that work well
      enough and exclude the rest,
   2. say in open text, that the rest of the things (and also newer
      versions of the provided software), even though many of them work
      fine in Fedora, are simply not available in Scientific Linux.

That would be only fair towards the users. Otherwise apparency of our 
wasteful efforts to find workarounds for bugs in old versions, that had 
already been fixed in newer versions since long, only discredits SL and 
Linux in general, etc.

Thanks !!

--
Dr. Anatoly Solomin   Researcher in Particle Physics   University of Bristol