Mihai P. B. Stiucan wrote:

Hello,

I am an RedHat user and now I saw that RedHat is no more available as a free distribution. So i want to switch to Debian. I found some help on the www.debian.org web site, but I still need some advices.

I saw there that they are 3 stages: stable, testing, unstable. For sure I choosed stable on my first pick,, got the images and installed it. After that, I noticed that all the utilities are old: XFree86, KDE, and most of the packages. I really need some new one, not necesarly the newest. Ok, ok, i know the new one are on testing, but I will assume the risk to use them.

For the most part, testing and unstable are quite usable on a desktop workstation that doesn't need 24x7 reliability. I run sid (unstable) on all my workstations (stable (woody) on my servers), and every few upgrades (I usually upgrade about twice a week on my main workstations to get the newest toys) see some sort of glitch, ranging from some one or three packages that gets broken (usually something I can live without for a few days until it gets fixed) to a more serious problem such as the pam problem a couple of years ago which prevented any new logins. I've found sid to be easier to live with than testing, because whereas testing is more stable, when a bug does show up in testing it usually takes longer for the fix to show up, because it's, um, more stable than the constantly fluxing unstable (sid).

Somebody told me to install woody and then to use apt-get to do some upgrades.

In fact I need some advices for install debian but with new packages. I don't have a big bandwidth internet access, just 128kb/sec, and I have only the woody CDs. What should i do? Just install woody and then upgrade using apt-get? How will this apt-get handle the Xfree86 or KDE upgrade? There are numerous files to upgrade, is it possible to keep track of all of them?

128kb/sec will be slow, but I've done upgrades over a 33.3kb modem on two or three occassions. It works, but slowly. The problem with the slow speed is that the packages change in sid faster than you can download them sometimes.

Still, I think the easiest route for you would be to point you /etc/apt/sources.list at a Debian mirror's testing or unstable repositories, then run
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
and sit back and let the magic work.


You might run into a few glitches, since you're going from a "supported" version to an "unsupported" version that's still in flux and is not guaranteed to upgrade smoothly, but I don't think you'll run into any great problems.

There would be an ideea to install it from scratch , but I'm not so experimented to keep track of the files by myself.

I will be very happy if I will succed to do a debian based system with XFree86 4.0.1 at least, and KDE 3.1 using Grub boot loader.

After the above-mentioned update/upgrade, you'll still have lilo instead of grub. So you'll then need to run "apt-get install grub", and then configure grub. I've done it a time or two, but my brain just hasn't quite wrapped itself around grub's configuration yet, so I can't help on that score.

--
Kent



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