Re: How would I get debian unstable?
On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 02:51:02PM +0100, annne annnie wrote:
> Hi, I'm the one who asked about getting unstable and the different distributions compared to debian. I have a few more questions, sorry. First question: How would I reply correctly so that my reply is still in the same topic?
> Someone mentioned something about apt-get upgrade causing locked packages that won't get upgraded or something... thats the kind of stuff I want to learn. How would I learn about how debian works and how to configure it all? All I have been doing so far is just googling the problems I have run into, but I'm not really learning anything.
> Also, when you guys say SUSe do you mean openSuSE? Because I would like to try it out, but the only one I could find out how to download was openSuSE.
> Last question(s), is there a unix one I could get for free? Are they similar to linux? What are the differences?
I believe Berkeley BSD is free. I'm told Apple chose it over Linux
as a basis for OS/X because it didn't have all the restrictions of the
GPL that required it to remain free, though. I'm also told it is
developed less aggressively, does not support all the latest hardware,
and is more stable than Linux. Not that anyone can really call Linux
unstable.
There have also been others. There's TUNIS (developed in toe 70's; no
idea whether it is still available or was ever free), and MINIX (Which was in one sense an
ancestor of Linux, but I don't think it was ever free).
And the FSF's own HURD will also replace Linux. Now HURD, like LINUX,
is not an operating system, but an operating system kernel. All the
applications on top of the kernel (like cat, ssh, OpenOffice) will
likele cun on HURD, Berkeley BSD, and Linux more or less indifferently
(though you'll probably have to recompile from source and make other
minor adjustments). In fact, I've heard that Debian has plans to
support HURD as well as Linux when it comes out. At that point Debian
will no longer be just a Linux distribution.
By the way, there may well be other systems that should be mentioned,
and I'd appreciate corrections if anything I've said is wrong.
-- hendrik
>
> Sythos <sythos@sythos.net> wrote: Scrive A J Stiles :
>
> > Yes, just edit
> > /etc/apt/sources.list
> > and change every occurrence of "stable", "etch", "testing" or "lenny"
> > to "sid". Then
> > # apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
> > and you should be good to go.
>
> Brrrrr!
>
> better "apt-get dist-upgrade" to handle in a better way packages replacing
> and new dependencies. More better is "aptitude"...
aptitude maintains additiona information -- which packages are there
because you asked for them as opposed to being there because other
packages needed them. It can remove them when they are no longer
needed.
>
> only "apt-get upgrade" may cause a lot of locked packages not upgrade
> automagically and the system became too much hybrid...
I've found with aptitude, repeated use of upgrade usually end up
accomplishing what dist-upgrade does.
I've also found that doing a complete upgrade from one release to
another (say, stable to testing) can chew up a lot of disk space on a
temporary basis unless you can get it done in small chunks. Upgrading
from testing to sid is probably not a huge problem, because the
distributions are quite similar.
-- hendrik
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