Hehe, I know the feeling :) Started with Slackware, went to RH, tried Suse, Mandrake and Gentoo (later) sometimes along the way, and have stayed with RH consistently since 5.2.
Kent gave an intro already to upgrade your system, you just have to specify in the apt source list which one you want. I haven't played with mixed installation (stable + testing + sid) yet. I don't like old desktops, so I upgrade my computers to sid. After using it for a month on my laptop and on two test servers (no GUI though), it seems good enough so I put them in real production use. Ok, small office, with a few servers and firewall/gateway only. If you are new to debian but know linux well, don't bother with the debian directly. Get Knoppix or Mepis installed on your machine first, and upgrade later. Will save you tons of time and frustration. I think your connection (128K) should be good enough to do the upgrade, if you can find a mirror that can give consistent download. The only thing I don't like is, even with sid, a lot of the packages are still old compared to other distros (Mandrake always has the most recent). And a few of them just don't work (e.g. mrproject, fwbuilder,...). I'll maintain some nightly/weekly build when I learn how to do my own deb packaging. And i18n/l10n is not as good either. I still can't get it to display Chinese in my gnome-terminal despite that I have made all the necessary config/fonts and installed and loaded the right nls packages of the filesystem. Applications can display/input Chinese just fine, the filesystem can't. RH and Mandrake just have the best support on this. Oh, and don't get me go into the installer. It just plain sucks (Yeah, shoot me, I said it!). For god sake, we are almost passed half of the first decaded of the 21 century, and we still can't have a good installer that recognizes the hardware properly. For my server, I didn't dare to buy any new hardware, only those that are at least 2 years old, and it still can't get it. E.g. DLink DFE-530TX, PT-Link cards, and some old ATI cards. I can pop Knoppix and Mepis in, and they just works fine. Same for RH, Mandrake and Suse. The package management is cool and fine, but if you can't get pass the installation, you can't use it. All my installations start with Knoppix, and then back to the debian upgrade. But Knoppix and Mepis have very primitive installer, you can't really specify your way of partitioning the disk. You have to partition your disk, format your filesystem, after installing knoppix, copy the files/directories to the partition you want, and make changes to your fstab, etc.... And Knoppix/Mepis only come with KDE and I prefer Gnome, while gnoppix is not ready yet, have to do about 300MB of install from apt-get to get my desktop to the way I like it (almost...) after spending all these times downloading the Knoppix/Mepis and debian ISO already :( Someone please make a good installer (something is going on here, but not ready yet), and start some kind of donation campaign, a la Mandrake Club or something. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I currently already have 3 machines running debian in production, and I'll pay for a good installer for my future installation. Actually, we are evaluating the distros for a client with a 50-server installation in a data center. They gave the hardware specs, and I'm really concerned about the debian installation process. I have always paid for my RH and Mandrake, retail box version though, to encourage them to make good desktop and encourage the stores to carry them. Sorry, long rant. I like the package mgmt though, on the condition that you can get it up and running first. kk --- "Mihai P. B. Stiucan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I am an RedHat user and now I saw that RedHat is no > more available as a > ... > I need some advices, really. > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]