fort77 compiler

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 07:24:03 -0700,
  Siavoush Dastmalchi <siavoush11 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> Many thanks for the suggestions. I think the best way is to do the upgrade. But the reason that I reluctant to do the upgrade is that I am not an expert in Linux and never installed a Linux OS on a machine. On top of this, the system is a cluster which has 8 nodes each with two dual core Opteron 2212 CPUs. There are few programs installed on the system and I am worry that I couldn't do the upgrade correctly and couldn't get the cluster up and running as before. 
> 
> Does the upgrade keeps track of the current configuration and keep every thing as before, without affecting the setup required for the communication among different nodes of the cluster, as well as the programs installed on the system? How difficult is that for a beginner with no previous experience on Linux OS installation. I am familiar with using Linux as an OS and usually do the installation of programs, but never done the configuration of system itself.

Do you have hardware for a test or development deployment? Without one it
will be very risky to do the upgrade. (Of course there is also risk in not
doing anything, just different risk.)

If you are upgrade adverse and can't afford to pay for support, you should
really think about using something based off RHEL such as CentOS or Scientific
Linux so that you don't need to do them very often. You would still need to
do updates, but they'd be lower risk than doing an upgrade.