LTS 6.06 and long-term viability

[Collins Richey]

I've been a Dapper Kubuntu user since the early development stages,
and for the most part I love it, or at least I used to love it on my
older PC where everything just worked. Now that that PC died, and I
have a current production unit (Gateway GT4016) I begin to worry
whether LTS 6.06 (just released) is already too ancient for my needs?

I presume that this is going to be a typical "Enterprise" release with
only security updates and no fuctional improvements over its lifetime?

The question is: are there going to be functional enhancements via the
Universe or Muliverse repositories that allow the user to keep up with
new equipment and/or major package improvements?

As an example, my current box has the following problems:

The box has an nVidia MCP51 motherboard, and there are problems with
sound and the network card. The sound card (snd_hda_intel driver does
not work. The network card has some glitches that are fixed in the
forcedeth driver at version 0.54 and above, whereas we are stuck at
0.48 on LTS 6.06. I've been told by nVidia personnel that the only
kernel that is likely to make all the components of this board operate
is the very latest experimental Fedora Core 5 kernel. The same nVidia
personnel mutter about the rather mouldy version of the nViidia video
drivers offered by LTS 6.06.

Add to this picture the fact that I could not even get an older sound
card to work. I installed an older Sound Blaster cards (ensonic
ens1371 driver). I could not get this card to produce sound on LTS
6.06 or on Debian Etch, but my oldy-mouldy CentOS (RHEL4 equivalent)
can drive the card just fine! The Debian-based distros loaded the same
modules as CentOS, and the alsamixer presented the same picture, but
no sound.

So, to make a long story short: is there any hope for a user with
newer PC peripherals on LTS 6.06?

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.