On 06/05/08 18:38, Andy Buckley wrote: > Troy Dawson wrote: > >> **Ubuntu Creep >> - We ran out of time for this. > > Oh well! Does anyone have any comments to make online? From my perspective, what matters with SL(C) is the validation of experiment software, and the (current) assumption at CERN that desktop == public interactive cluster == batch service == grid (i.e. HEP-wide compatibility). We also explicitly support SLC via our helpdesk/Linux team (everything else is at best "best effort", and the "best" is not really "best"). Using any other distribution is a conscious choice by the user * not to get support from us (or at least not to insist too much) * not to be able to run locally-developed things on other machines * not to get CERN services pre-configured (i.e. manual work) In this respect the exact choice between Fedora or Ubuntu or Gentoo or SuSE (or even MacOS, or - why not - Vista) doesn't really matter. As long as users=owners keep their machines secure (and any still-supported distro, with more-or-less automatic updates will do here), our security team is OK. Running SL in a virtual machine on top of <whatever> means we won't support "hardware" or "installation" issues, but anything above that is still fair game for a support call. And if the user spends some man-years tweaking BSD to their liking, this is an issue for their line management, not us.. unless they can demonstrate that our supported SLC offering is plain unusable (which is currently not the case). So for us "Ubuntu creep" is not a major problem (unless it becomes a "Ubuntu rush"), and perhaps an opportunity to get rid of difficult-to-support hardware types (recent laptops on SL4?.. why don't you try..), at the expense of having some minimal documentation for CERN services to be used from other machines. If ever a majority of our desktop users decide to ditch SL in favour of something newer, we'd have to reconsider - but even then the slow-moving middleware and experiments frameworks would make a "stable" enterprise-class distro attractive at least for central services. Just my 0.02€ Jan