This is a big request, and a fairly vague one, so take it for what it's worth.

Linode supports a lot of distros now, but many of the supported systems are out of date. Linode is on Fedora 11 now, and Centos 5.3, for example. And we never really know when updates will take place.

This means that if you're going to run a server on CentOS, you don't know when you'll be able to upgrade.

It would be a very good thing if there was a little more formality to distro support -- if linode said, "We're going to support these big distros, and that means that within a month of a new release, they'll show up here as options."

Thanks...

Well.. that only applies to new installs, yes?

You can just yum upgrade your way to the latest.

It is sad. Ubuntu 10.04 gets added the same day it's released, but Fedora 13 is almost out and Linode only has 11. Arch Linux is behind as well, I believe.

I've been working on a new build system for our distro images and we're planning to make more regular updates of them in the future. Getting the Lucid image out was a big part of my testing and I'll be moving on to update the other distros we offer over then next few weeks. Once we've got this system in-place, we should be able to keep up with new distro releases a lot better.

-James

With Linode using Ubuntu internally I am pretty sure they are a bit biased with which distro to support first

Doesn't matter to me anyway, as I am going to deploy a new Ubuntu 10.04 node today

You can see what our customer base is installing as well:

http://www.linode.com/about/

Ubuntu rocks! Used it at home, wife and me since 7.04. Upgrading home and our Linode this week-end!

I must be one of the 0.0000000001% of Linode users using Slackware

Actually I picked up Linode as a VPS provider because it is one of the few offering Slackware as a supported distribution.

Plans to upgrade its available version too?
13.0 has been out for very long time now, and 13.1 is on its way to arrival.

If linode can provide Scientific Linux(a CentOS clone)?

Thanks.

lol, how can a rolling release distro ever be 'behind'? You do sudo pacman -Syu and you're up to date with the latest packages.

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Consider using this guide to install it yourself.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Ok, Thank you.

Maybe the new linode panel could allow some way of importing and exporting disk images (via some sort of upload/download form).

Since the data would be transferred to the host machine, I'm sure counting the bandwidth used would be more than fair.

Trust me, you don't want to upload disk images via an HTML form. Those kinds of large file transfers require something a bit more robust that can provide progress and resume support. That usually requires Flash or Java (although you can get the progress part with javascript providing you have server-side support).

It would be somewhat of an adventure making it work, as the Manager (and, by extension, the API) do not have direct access to the actual hosts. Some sort of direct connectivity from the user's web browser to the hosts would be required to make this sensible, and that's a big can of worms.

Someone should whip up a StackScript that deploys a tight Ubuntu image, sets up the necessary configuration profile magic, and installs a basic web server to handle the transfers. That would get the job done.

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