bgeer wrote:

>
> Enlightened use of partitioning, automounting, nfs, & servers can go a
> long way to reducing the problem.
>

True, but that has a complexity all its own and I wonder if the trade-off of
this vs. an upgrade every 1.5 to 2 years is worth it.

> & then there is the argument about adopting every release - is it
> really necessary?**By*"really"*I*mean*a*functional*necess ity,*not*a*"I
> want the latest gee-whiz poobah" thing.

I'm glad you said that. Believe it or not our little biz runs pretty well on
9.1. There are some new KDE things we might like to try. On the whole it's a
"we really should have the latest stuff" kind of mindset.

Really. How many of you are still running 8 trough 9.1? Anyone?

As an aside, this is why mega-corporations like the ERP paradigm which is a
fancy acronym where ALL your applications are by one vendor and integrated
together.... as SAP does, and which is why Oracle wanted Peoplesoft. You
don't have a hodge-podge of 3rd party applications and it makes upgrading
easier as it's all "managed" by the vendor. I'm not pitching or endorsing the
ERP approach, but it does have a lot of proponents out there in mega-corp
land.

And as another aside this is why we (our company) likes to use as many
web-apps as we can (and why we wrote our own.... www.jaya123.com !!!) We do
all our payables via online banking, all our payroll via www.paycycle.com,
our taxes via www.taxact.com, our investing via Ameritrade, our faxing
through a fax service, and so on. We love the thin-client approach... a
bullet-proof OS like Slackware Linux giving us access to the outside world.
We're not Linux gurus. We're just trying to scratch out a living in the book
biz and the web-service biz and upgrading from scratch is a major PITA for
little people like us who don't have the staff (or who don't want to spend
the money for consultants) to do it. To you guys who re-install Slackware
every two weeks, it's a piece of cake. But to "real people" it's not :-)

Still, I really would like to run 10.1. But I don't know why :-)

Al C.