On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:54:02 -0800 Paul Johnson <ba...@ursamundi.org> dijo:
> John Jason Jordan wrote: > > > Having spent just a day in testing I am not happy with the quantity of > > bugs. Yes, I know it is called "testing" for a reason. And I am happy > > to do my part to help fix problems. Yet I need a computer that I can > > use for real work. But at the same time I want the latest and greatest. > > I need OOo 3.1 and Scribus 1.3.5.1 and the most recent versions of > > several other apps that I live in all day long. > > Really? What do OOo 3.1 and Scribus 1.3.5.1 have to offer that you > can't do in older versions? OOo 3.1.1 fixes a lot of bugs when using Math in a Writer document. I need that feature to work. Scribus 1.3.5.1 adds so many features that it would take too long to list them. Suffice it to say that I need the new features. I do book design and layout, and these tools are critical to me. > > The stable versions of Debian are not sufficiently cutting edge for me. Or > > have I > > misunderstood that? > Probably misunderstood. Testing is NOT for you if you just want it to > work. That's what stable is for. Stability or cutting edge: Pick one. > > The local Linux friends who thought I should move on from Ubuntu > > suggested testing as the closest in the Debian world to the Ubuntu way > > of doing things. After today I am thinking they were wrong. > Ubuntu is closest to the Debian way of thinking, if Debian were clubbed > in the head with a brick by Special Ed to make Debian "special" too. I was migrating from Ubuntu Jaunty. One of my goals in doing so was to increase my knowledge. The other goal was to get a distribution that is better supported by the Scribus developers. Scribus depends on Qt4, and apparently the Ubuntu developers have taken liberties with it. Scribus developers do not mince words in expressing their dislike of Ubuntu. They openly suggest Debian, Fedora or OpenSuse. Debian package management has no peer in the Linux world. Hence, Debian was my first choice. I should add that in order to embark on this journey I purchased a new hard disk for my laptop. The only one with Jaunty sits on a shelf. I can use it as a source of config files and data, or I can just put it back in and I am back where I was in Jaunty. What has happened since I posed the question at the beginning of this thread is that I tried installing Unstable. In doing so I wiped out Testing and reformatted the hard disk. At the end of the installation it asked if I wanted Grub 2, Grub 1.5, or LILO. I selected Grub 2. But when the installer tried to write Grub 2 to the MBR something bad happened and I got an error message that installing Grub had failed. I used the back button and tried installing Grub 1.5 instead, but that also failed. I used the back button once more and installed LILO. Unfortunately, thinking that it would make it easier to replace LILO with Grub later, I told it to install it to sda1 (which is /) instead of sda. LILO installed fine, but when I rebooted at the end of the installation I got a Grub 2 error screen. I could not recover from the error screen because the commands available are useless. In short, there was no way to boot. This was the fourth time I had attempted to install a version of Debian. In each case I had problems that I was unable to repair. The first two times with testing I lost the window manager and gnome-panel. I tried at least a dozen suggestions to fix the problem, but I could not get them to load automatically on login. I even set up a new user, where metacity and gnome panel worked fine. But after a day of working as the new user, suddenly I lost metacity and gnome-panel again. The only way to sleuth down exactly what was causing the problem would be to log out and back in again after every single little configuration change or app install, which would take a week at least. After the mess with an unbootable Unstable yesterday (which takes nearly two hours to install over the internet), I was so bummed at Debian that last night I installed Fedora 12. As I expected, package management sucks compared to the Debian world. But it connected to my bluetooth mouse right off (which worked fine in Jaunty as well) but which I could never get working in Debian. And so far there have been no problems. I'm going to stick with Fedora for a while and see how it goes. I still love Debian. But the problem is that every version of Debian, including the derivatives like Ubuntu, have problems that render them unsuitable for me. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org