[TriLUG] More Installfest questions 2 ...

[Bill Vinson]

On Friday, May 3, 2002, at 02:29 PM, Kevin - The Alchemist - Sonney 
wrote:

> if you plan on doing a debian install, I've found its helpful to know
> exactly what's in your system. Mandrake and Red Hat have a slightly (no
> offense, guys, this is my experience) better track record on finding and
> installing the latest & greatest hardware with their stable releases.

Debian isn't as good for install & go. Sometimes things take a little 
more work. But, then again out of the box RH & Mandrake are no where 
near as easily configurable as Debian IMHO.  Also, Debian can install in 
tiny amounts of space and its installer doesn't get in my way as the 
others do.  My favorite method of install is to install potato. Upon 
reboot it will ask you what groups of packages are wanted (if you take 
the simple install route).  At this point I exit with nothing to 
install. Change the apt config to point at testing or unstable and 
'apt-get dist-upgrade'.  This will upgrade pretty much everything that 
is on the system (Sometimes you have to install one or 2 kept back 
packages, but again this is easy in apt). Then I install x-windows 
packages and something like kernel-package (The debian kernel build 
setup).  This will pretty well upgrade the system to a very usable state 
as almost everything I want is needed for one of those two things except 
maybe Windowmaker or KDE.  apt does a very good job with dependencies 
and picks up all the needed packages.

> (FYI - debian "unstable" is one of the most stable development branches
> I've run into. They do their work really well over there. Their unstable
> usually means more of a "subject to change without notice, and that
> change might break things" instead of "causes system to crash hard and
> repeatedly")

I will echo this as Debian is amazing. Unstable is very stable except 
for the occasional library issue.

Bill

-----------------------------------
Bill Vinson
http://www.trilug.org/~billv