Re: How unstable is Potato?
John Gay wrote:
>
> Judging from the Debian weekly news recently posted, the main stopping point for
> freezing Potato is the boot floppies. I'm running a Slink system because I am
> very new to Linux and UNIX. The only deviation from Slink is I installed an
> updated Xserver for my ATI AGP Rage+ video card. I have been compiling new
> kernels to try to get USB working for a few projects, but other than that, I'm
> very nervous of upgrading. I recently got a new scanner, because I couldn't get
> the USB one working, but I can't compile xsane or xscanimage because I need gtk+
> 1.2, which, although gtk does have slink .debs for it, it also requires xlib6g
> >=3.3.4. This, in turn relies on libc6 >=1.2. Both of these requires Potato. If
> the boot floppies are the main problem with potato, I'd upgrade because I've
> already got a working system. But if upgrading is going to break lots of stuff,
> I guess I'll wait till the next millennium. I did have a very bad experience
No reason to wait thirteen months for potato. By then the next version
will probably either be out or close to it. I've got a potato box here -
started with a slink CD, installed it, then did a full upgrade to potato
via dial-up. Took time, but solely due to the speed I (wasn't) getting on
the connection.
> when I did upgrade libc6 to 1.2 a while ago, then tried to install StarOffice.
> StarOffice insisted on updating some libraries and rendered my system completely
> broken! Even the help of Linux experts couldn't recommend anything but a
> complete install. This was back in June, and I think I remember something about
> Potato being in very bad shape at that moment. I now have StarOffice rpm's on a
> CD-ROM I got on a magazine cover, but I haven't installed it yet.
I tried Star Office for a while. Wound up dumping it - so slow and such a
resource hog that what little it offered wasn't worth it. Stuck with Word
Perfect 8 for what M$-compatable word processing I needed at that time.
Currently I use emacs combined with LaTex for documents.
> So, My main question is, other than the boot floppies, is Potato fairly safe and
> stable for a relative newbie? My system doesn't have apt installed, but I should
> be able to use dselect to upgrade. Would it be easier to use dselect to install
> apt via ftp and then use apt to update the rest of my system?
The one problem I had when I upgraded to potato was the kernel - seems
there were some pretty hefty memory leaks in the kernel that it came
with. Upgraded to 2.2.13 and that was solved. I'm still dinking around
with that box so my uptime isn't very high, but it has never given me a
system level problem that wasn't caused by my dinking. Some of the
individual apps are giving me fits, but that's not related to whether I'm
running potato, slink, or whatever else. I did my upgrade via apt - that
was *really* easy. Basically it was one command line, go to bed, get up
in the morning with a fresh potato system.
--
Mike Werner KA8YSD | "Where do you want to go today?"
ICQ# 12934898 | "As far from Redmond as possible!"
'91 GS500E |
Morgantown WV | Only dead fish go with the flow.
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