upgrade to unstable: dselect maddness? help!

["Chris Cothrun" <cothrun@lvcm.com>]

Hi

I'm setting up Debian on a computer to be used as a 
part time web surfing box and to use as a 
developmental web server and to better learn about 
Linux as a whole. I installed potato but it didn't seem 
to easily allow me to grab newer packages I wanted. 
I managed to hose my system (at least from my point 
of view, I tried to install mozilla 0.9.3 and ended up 
with glibc2.2 errors and couldn't start anything).

So I started with a fresh potato with very little 
installed, changed my sources.list to point to 
unstable, did the apt-get update and apt-get dist-
upgrade and then started slowly installing packages. 
I've been using dselect but it seems to get itself stuck 
into a weird dependancy thing so I need some 
advice here:

1)Can anyone suggest some reading material? I've 
searched and I've found lots of quick little how-tos 
that suggest that this is all pretty easy however my 
experience bears out differently. 

2) should I use apt-get over dselect?

3)I see that there are some tasks - I sucessfully used 
apt-get install task-xfree86 (or something like that) to 
get X installed -  is there a list of tasks anywhere? I 
can't find them with google. I know about tasksel, are 
those the only tasks defined that I can install?

4)Should I have installed a potato that more closely 
resembled the working configuration I want and then 
do the dist-upgrade voodoo?

I'll come up with some more questions as I fight with 
this...

Thanks!

Chris