Re: IBM T42 - Sarge or Sid?
On 17 Apr 2005, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-04-16 at 23:53 -0500, Ryan Nowakowski wrote:
>>>> I am hoping to get some opinions on this. I will building Debian on a
>>>> Thinkpad T42 for my lovely bride this weekend. I'm currently undecided
>>>> whether to put Sarge or Sid on it. On my machine I run Sid since I'm a
>>>> wannabe developer and will file bug reports when necessary. However, on her
>>>> machine it would probably be better to have a more (soon to be!) stable
>>>> system.
>>>>
>>>> So my question is, would it be better to install Sarge and back port things
>>>> as necessary or let a Debian newbie run Sid?
>
> Sarge with backports, or maybe Ubuntu. The latest release, Hoary, is
> excellent.
I second this advice, because it will give you the most stable and
secure system. Once you get there, you can consider if you actually
need a newer software, and if it is worth the cost.
> As someone whose main desktop used to run Sid with daily updates, the
> frustration it caused my wife was quite impressive as there was always
> something broken.
Automatically updating unstable is, as you note, a bad idea.
If you do want to use this, my advice (aside from don't automatically
update) is to use apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs, and to make *sure*
you test on a scratch machine before a production machine.[1]
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] or, in this case, your system before the one your wife uses.
--
One need only remind oneself of all that we expect from life to see how very
strange it is, and to arrive at the conclusion that man has found his way into
it by mistake and does not really belong there.
-- Italo Svevo
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