Re: Debian instalation

[Kent West]

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


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]