Hi All,

Got my first look at SL 7.  Installed it to hard drive
on my shop computer.  Eventually the idea was to learn
from my shop computer and migrate the knowledge
to my office computer.

My office computer is SL 6.5 x64.  It is set up with all
the server goodies I use at my customer sites.  This so
I can test things etc..  My office computer also serves as
a workstation for my business.

SL 7 is now 64 bit only.  Means no 32 bit Windows applications
under 64 bit only Wine.  OUCH!

SL 7 is also still suffering from the out-of-dates.  The base
system is up to date, but the utilities are still sadly
out-of-date: bugs and all.  EPEL's Xfce is especially out-of-date
and only includes only a few Xfce plug ins.  Most of my favorite
utilties/programs are still sadly out-of-date and include various
old bugs and loss of functionality.

On my shop computer, it got so bad that I ripped out SL 7 and
installed Fedora Code 21 Beta 4 from an Xfce Live CD.
Oh boy is it nice.  Even got VLC installed without a single
tear.  All of Xfce's plug-ins are present.  Firefox
is -- get this -- actually up-to-date!  (I can't help
but notice that Cent OS 7 is keeping up-to-date now
with Firefox, but SL 7 is not.)  And Wine32 works too.
Libre Office is even up to date (mostly).

And I support Fedora too, so a loss of time with the installing,
the ripping, the reinstalling, but a nice amount of knowledge
gained.  I had to learn Fedora 21 anyway.

So the big question on my office computer is

  1) to leave it on the much more workstation friendly
     SL6.x (wine on SL 6.x stinks it is so out-of-date
     and Libre-CAD is crash city)

or

  2) to upgrade it to FC21 server and relegate SL to a
     virtual machine?  That way I could have a reasonable
     workstation and still test server stuff in SL7.

Heads up on XFS.  SL 7 installs it by default.  FC 21
still installs EXT4 by default.

Whole hard drive encryption works marvelously on both.
FC 21 can even read encrypted XFS disks from SL 7.

Wine on FC21 removes a lot of the bugs and loss of functionality
you have to suffer with on SL 6.x when used as a workstation.
And I have to say, Wine is starting to come into its own -- its is still 
Beta code though.

The learning in the field never stops.

SL 7 seems to have all the goodies for a decent server.
But it has now become a *nightmare* to use as a workstation.

-T

-- 
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Computers are like air conditioners.
They malfunction when you open windows
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