Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Living with ALT Linux Sisyphus


I have always liked to have something "commie" in my life around me , ALT Linux is one more example. I have been using this distribution from Russia for past many year on different occasions for different lengths of time.


Recently I installed the last stable release of ALT Linux Ark Desktop .There is a nicely written review about this version on Finid`s blog. The installation went smooth and my favourite GNOME was installed without any issue. Since this version was released in late 2009 so the gnome and installed packages running on it were quite old so I decided to move to "branch" repositories which are equivalent to debian testing.

With the help of my friends at IRC #altlinux I changed repositories to 5.1 branch and went for full upgrade. The installation went smooth again and I had a fully upgraded and stable system on branch. Using branch is what the ALT Linux team recommends to those who want to have a stable working system .

Then a time comes when you want to be a bit daring and you want to move to Sisyphus which is the unstable softwares bank for ALT Linux but where you get the lastest bleeding edge packages. This was the time I decided to move to Sisyphus. Once again with the help of my friends from ALT Linux team and with their aforehead warnings I changed my repositories to Sisyphus and went ahead for full upgrade. This time the upgrades mounted to more than 600mbs and with my fingers crossed the upgrade went literally smooth without any hiccup.

On reboot I had two minor glitches otherwise it is fully upgraded system with all the packages at the latest version including Gnome 2.28.2. I have already submitted those minor bugs to ALT Linux Team. If you plan to use ALT Linux sisyphus do not hesitate to report the bugs and issues at ALT Linux Bugzilla

Sisyphus is unstable but still more stable than can be debian sid/unstable. In past 24 hours I have not seen any major issue with my system. ALT Linux team constantly combs out the packages at Sisyphus and once packages are stable enough for daily use they are released to the branch section of repositories.

I will not recommend everyone to move to Sisyphus but those who want to use Mandriva cooker or debian sid can move to Sisyphus and I am sure they will find Sisyphus more stable than the former ones.

I will stay on Sisyphus and enjoy the best of this distributions from Russia.There is no harm in paying back to my former commies friends by staying on so called 'unstable" but still stable Sisyphus!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

...i never been a linux user but i always enjoy and read ur articles... it's been a long time since you wrote ur last article... glad ur back to ur sit again..thanks!

Dr.Saleem Khan Marwat said...

Thank you for your liking for my blog posts,you can always convert to linux if you like, its not so difficult to do so.