. . I didn't get a sob story about how they couldn't ship because they couldn't print the UPS manifest (UPS runs on a Win box and prints through Samba to racoon's printer). One thing you can count on is a wholesaler is going to let you know about it if they can't ship. I wanted to test this but traffic is impossible at that time of day, so by time I got there all I could really do is grab the machine and run.
There was no time to mess around (or the client really wouldn't be able to ship). I simply upgraded it from Caldera Open Desktop 2.2 to Caldera eDesktop 2.4 and StarOffice 5.0 to StarOffice 5.2 (the other workstations were upgraded some time ago). Delivered back the next day, and all was well.
Linux servers can run for years untouched, but Linux on the desktop needs a major upgrade about twice as often as Windows due to rapid change. Fortunately it's easier than upgrading Windows because there's no registry (and because it'll still run on the same machine).
My hd partitioning for workstations is /, swap, /home, with all the critical stuff in /home so it isn't wiped out by upgrades. On servers I have /, swap, /home, /u. All the configurations, user software and NFS and Samba shares are in /u. Very simplistic compared to what I've seen other Linux users do, but it works just fine, doesn't need "extended partitions", and I don't have to figure out exactly how much I need in /var, /boot, /opt, /this, /that, and /other_thing.