Re: new to debian

[Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

"Terry A. Bowling" <terry.bowling@verizon.com> writes:

> 1. Reading the Install Docs on 2.2r4's disk 1, it notes that kernel
> 2.4.x is not officially supported and does not come with KDE2 or
> XFree4.x.  Is this documentation simply outdated - maybe from the
> release of 2.2r1?  Or is this still the case.

This is still the case. For stability, Debian doesn't introduce such
major changes in stable releases.

Probably you should just try the testing release "woody", for which
boot disks can be found at
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-alpha/current/. The
woody distribution includes XFree 4 and KDE (but does not use kernel
2.4 by default, but it's supported).

> 2. How well are debian packages updated.  I use Mandrake x86 at home and
> I love the fact that Mandrake Cooker has multiple revisions new
> software practically on the day they are released.  I understand
> that especially on the alpha platform I need to be more patient, but
> I hope Debian is not as sluggish as RedHat.

If you like frequent updates, you can stay with the "unstable"
branches, were releases also occur on a daily basis. Things break
sometimes, though. The lag behind i386 releases is usually not very
high, a few days perhaps.

        Falk