Re: Recommended way to use Debian?

Thanks Rubin & David for the replies.

Unfortunately I need Skype, VirtualBox, Oracle JDK and NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, I need those many times each day for my work as a remote developer. I'd love to get rid of Flash, so just now I switched YouTube to use WebM instead (go to "http://www.youtube.com/html5") as a start. But when I experience browser crashes, it's not while doing anything strange like watching youtube so I don't think Flash is my problem. Maybe when Dolphin or Plasma or Iceweasel crash it really is a problem with my RAM hardware (I put 16GB RAM in my laptop since i often build Android from source and often use WinXP through VirtualBox), possibly related to the fact I use 5GB of RAM as a ramdisk where I do lots of my temp stuff in.

For the repeatable bugs I found in Kate & Inkscape, you guys convinced me I should file the bug reports and then find ways to live around the bugs for the near future. I sent a message to this group recently about the Kate crash because I wasn't sure how to report it, but no-one replied: "http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2013/06/msg00014.html". For the Inkscape crash i tested it on Mint KDE 14, Mint KDE 13 and ArchLinux and none of those crashed, only Debian Stable, and only while using OpenGL as the KWin renderer (ie: it doesn't crash while using XRender), so I'm also a bit confused about whether to file a bug to Debian or to Inkscape, since it seems to have been fixed in recent versions of Inkscape.

I haven't looked into back-porting packages yet since I read on the Debian FAQ that you shouldn't mix both Stable and Testing in your apt source list, but now I realize back-porting is a way to compile new Testing or SID software packages into the equivalent of Stable packages without modifying my apt sources (or am I wrong?). So from you guys it sounds like I should back-port Inkscape & Skype & NVIDIA driver & CUDA Toolkit, since it is possible that my sudden Plasma crashes or Inkscape crashes are related to the Wheezy's older NVIDIA display driver interacting strangely with Optimus technology (dual GPU).

Cheers,
Shervin Emami.
http://www.shervinemami.info/openCV.html

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 11:40 PM, David Smith <sidicas2@gmail.com> wrote:

On 07/15/2013 01:14 PM, Shervin Emami wrote:

Hi,

Any recommendations on how to get more stability? Because I really want to stick with Debian KDE for long-term.

As far as iceweasel crashing, I think that's really bizarre.. I use it everyday for years on lots of different hardware and it's *never* crashed for me. To add to that, the Mozilla/Iceweasel/Firefox team have been very good at "blacklisting" graphics drivers that don't support hardware accelerated webgl, etc. So you really shouldn't be getting crashes for any reason. I would suggest investigating the possibility of hardware failure (memtest86+, cpu/gpu stress tests, etc).

I've also found repeatable bugs that crash apps such as Kate and Inkscape but when I start to file bug reports I realize I shouldn't because Debian Stable is using old versions of the software and these bugs were fixed in later versions

Yes, I've had repeatable crashes with Kate related to collapsing/expanding sections of code in .patch files which I found and reported to upstream back before Debian Wheezy was even frozen. It took almost a year and 50+ duplicate bug reports before it was fixed by Kate devs, and the fix missed the Wheezy freeze window. That's just the way things are sometimes with upstream, you either learn to use the software in a way that doesn't cause it to crash until they fix it, you learn to fix it yourself and submit a patch, or you use something else because there are about a million great alternatives to Kate.

As a Debian user for 10+ years, I would suggest just running Debian stable for now and grab newer versions of software if you need it from wheezy-backports (if available).

Sometimes you can "apt-get source" the package source from unstable and recompile it yourself for stable. I did that just now for Inkscape 0.48.4-1 (unstable) and the package installs and runs perfectly fine on Wheezy. If your troubles in inkscape still aren't fixed, make sure you get them reported to upstream.

-David