[TriLUG] More Installfest questions 2 ...

[Mark Johnson]

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

> [...]

> My favorite method of install is to install potato. 

Except now use 'Woody', instead of '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'.  

Yep, pretty much verbatim what I do. 

The ideas behind this strategy are: 

	- stable releases are much easier to install

	- the unstable (or testing) branch are what you wanna run on
          your desktop. All the latest, greatest packages are in
          unstable. And things rarely break. Caveat: if this is for a
          server-only setup, definitely stick with stable.)


FWIW, I pretty much agree with everything below, too. 

Esp the 'Debian is amazing' part. But I'm not at all unbiased.

You simply don't hear much about Debian because there isn't any
advertising. OTOH, HP uses Debian as their official linux development
platform, and they IMO don't suck at all.

Mark


> 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
> 

_____________________________________
Mark Johnson        <mark at duke.edu>
Debian SGML         <mrj at debian.org>
Home Page:          <http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/>
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