[PLUG] Re: Got hacked last night - HELP!

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, John Meissen wrote:

> I can't really fault Mandrake. When you're giving away most of your
> product for free it's difficult to support the resources needed to
> maintain a lot of legacy versions.

John,

   This brings up a very good point. The upgrade path for distributions must
be as painless as possible so folks have no excuse to not keep current. I
remember there were some problems moving from Red Hat 5.x to 6.x but it
wasn't too bad. Going from 6.x to 7.x generated weeks of traffic on this
mail list as folks had all sorts of pain. When I finally made the move, sure
enough, I tripped over a number of issues. I recall that there were similar
pains going to 8.x and 9.x; perhaps to the FC series, too.

   The only other distribution that I have installed and used is Slackware.
Started with 8.1 and moved seamlessly through 9.0, 9.1 and now 10.0. Even
the kernel is upgraded with no hassles. I understand that Debian offers the
same ease of keeping current. It's interesting that this aspect of
distributions doesn't seem to come up in discussions -- or flame wars. But,
in my opinion it's a definite factor in keeping a system current as well as
patched.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>   Voice: 503-667-4517   Fax: 503-667-8863