On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 09:45:59AM +0000, Chris G wrote:
Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with only security updates and such until the next release?
I believe that is the goal of most of the Enterprise versions out there...
(Or, alternatively, Debian Stable... or if you want even closer to latest versions of graphical software, Ubuntu - hell, there's even a server variant now :p)
General requirements are:-
Not too "GUI and Windows oriented", Fedora is definitely as far as I'd want to go in this direction. A reasonably good package management utility, Fedora's yum makes life a lot easier than Slackware. I run FVWM2 as my window manager so any distribution that makes it difficult to do this is out! Must run Vmware fairly smoothly, I think most probably will, Slackware was slightly messy because of its different initialisation script structure.Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's accounts. Running them via Vmware on my desktop is just *so* much nicer than running on a separate machine that I'll never go back. It's all well backed up and, if the Linux/Vmware goes completely pear shaped I could easily enough just put them on a dedicated machine so absolute reliability of Vmware isn't necessary.
So, if you want to continue on the rpm based distribution route you might want to consider CentOS, which is the Free version of RHEL.
Otherwise: Debian Stable (and for those really needed newer pieces of software, backports.org) Ubuntu Stable (though you'll probably end up pulling lots of things through universe/multiverse)
Also... the statement 'Not too "GUI and Windows oriented"' suggests that you're rather novice at using linux distributions overall, or are very used to just running an install and clicking the "typical" button - most distributions give a way of manually selecting what you want to install.
Thanks,