Precise Pangolin alpha 1

[GreyGeek]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

It is always good to err on the side of caution, especially if your income depends on having your desktop come up and run reliably every day.

That said, my own experience with both 9.04 and 10.04, both of which I started with ALPHA or BETA, have been good through that period.

With 10.04 I had an update kernel update kill the video about a year ago, which forced me to pin the previous kernel for a few months, but about six months ago I gave the latest kernel update a test and it, and all subsequent kernels have worked fine and both releases ran stable and secure without other interruptions.

So, breakages can happen at any time on any particular hardware with any particular distro version. One could, after they got their hardware and apps installed and running without problems, disable all updates and run the system as it is, accepting only security updates manually. Or not, since a secure Linux box is rarely the victim of a successful hack and never the victim of an email attack, unless one is running root or is easily duped by social engineering. If that is the case then updates don't matter.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

but I would not bet my daily productivity on it in the next 60 days... Just sayin' ....

All my docs and prezos and schtuff live in the cloud. My primary work environment -- the Windows VM -- gets backed up to my home server every evening. So what have I got to lose, really?

But maybe I'll wait a bit longer...

[GreyGeek]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

Knowing that "past performance is no guarantee of future profits", as Dible points out, I was reluctant to install Precise on this machine, But, it slowly occured to this 70 year old brain that I have Lucid on my Sony and it is stable as a rock and has ALL my stuff on it. What do I got to lose? A reinstalltion is only 15 minutes away. So, I went with it. Overall, I am glad I did. Will I switch to this laptop as my primary box? No. Not unitl Precise goes Gold. After that update is over and things seem stable this box will become my primary. Until then, I will use it as IF it were my primary box except for banking and online shopping.

[tdockery97]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

I installed the Jan 6th nightly build yesterday. Installed and updated last night, and have been setting it up and running it for about 6 hours now. So far no crashes. Wine 1.3 did, in fact, install correctly. Pokerstars and Angry Birds work flawlessly under Wine in full-screen mode. So far no crashes. The only bug I've noticed so far is that the taskbar STILL retains a ghost of previously open window. I would have thought that after all the version increases since 4.7.3 that the KDE devs would have fixed this flaw. Other than that, so far 12.04 seems completely stable (and fast, even with desktop effects).

Edit: Also Google Earth is running flawlessly, however I am using the 32-bit version of Precise so that may make a difference.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

tdockery97:

If possible, would you post the output of:

apt-rdepends | grep ia32

and

apt-cache policy ia32-libs

Thanks.

[tdockery97]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

Not sure how helpful it will be, but this is what came up:

tom@tom-laptop:~$ apt-rdepends | grep ia32
Usage:
apt-rdepends [options] [*pkgs* ...]

Options:
-b, --build-depends show build dependencies
-d, --dotty generates a dotty graph
-p, --print-state show the state of each dependency
-r, --reverse list packages that depend on the specified one
-f, --follow=DEPENDS only follow DEPENDS dependencies recursively
-s, --show=DEPENDS only show DEPENDS dependencies
--state-follow=STATES only follow STATES states recursively
--state-show=STATES only show STATES states
--help display this help and exit
--man display the man page and exit
--version output version information and exit

tom@tom-laptop:~$ apt-cache policy ia32-libs
ia32-libs:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: (none)
Version table:

And this is my system:

tom@tom-laptop:~$ inxi -S
System: Host tom-laptop Kernel 3.2.0-8-generic-pae i686 (32 bit) Desktop KDE 4.7.97 Distro Ubuntu 12.04 precise

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

Sorry, should have been:

apt-rdepends wine1.3 | grep ia32

but it's irrelevant given that:

System: Host tom-laptop Kernel 3.2.0-8-generic-pae i686 (32 bit)

64-bit, it won't work.

[tdockery97]

Re: Precise Pangolin alpha 1

Even though I have a 64-bit capable laptop, I've always used 32-bit versions of Linux due to just such problems as above. Flash used to be a big problem on 64-bit in the past also. Since I don't do video encoding or complex mathematical calculations I don't see an advantage for me to use 64-bit. The devs seem to be doing a great job on Precise, so I'm sure it won't be long before all necessary libs are in place.