Linux Question

[DrJim]

I decided to put this question here, since it is more of a software management question than one intended for a techinical discussion.

In looking at the various Wiki articles, I came across the following:
''Ubuntu releases new versions every six months, and supports those releases for 18 months ..."

Apparently Mint has switched over to the same distribution schedule, since it is partially based on Ubuntu.

I note that Ubuntu and Mint seem to be the most frequent versions of Linux mentioned in this forum. How does their type of version update schedule fit in with Alice - which, at least in the case of 2.0, hasn't been updated for over two years. Are the new Linux releases sufficiently backward compatible to work (unlike ver. 1.6 of the JRE, at least according to a recent posting) or do you have to keep several versions on your machine at the same time?

[Kennebel]

I note that Ubuntu and Mint seem to be the most frequent versions of Linux mentioned in this forum. How does their type of version update schedule fit in with Alice - which, at least in the case of 2.0, hasn't been updated for over two years. Are the new Linux releases sufficiently backward compatible to work (unlike ver. 1.6 of the JRE, at least according to a recent posting) or do you have to keep several versions on your machine at the same time?

Well, i currently use Fedora 9, which was released in May of this year. (Fedora also releases on a 6 month schedule) I followed the directions of another post on this site, and installed the current Sun Java SDK, and it works great. While i just had the default java installed running Alice, the normal interface worked fine, but when i hit the "Play" button, the new window would open, and just keep trying to expand to fill the screen, causing all sorts of strangeness. New java, works great. It does crash occasionally, but that is to be expected from a cross-platform java app.

If my experience is an indicator, the item to watch would be the Java implementation, rather than the underlying OS. I expect that with the amount of Java code in production, the core maintainers wouldn't do too much to break backwards compatibility wherever possible.

The other side is OpenGL, which hasn't changed a great deal in the past 5 years. (which is a sore point when talking about shaders, but i digress)

So, i didn't answer to your Ubuntu question, sorry. :) (i used Ubuntu for a couple of years, but i've been a red hat person for nearly 12 years, so i went back)