Considering switching to debian

[Jim Richardson <warlock@eskimo.com>]

I am currently using SuSE (6.4 and 7.0 on various machines) but am getting fed
up with the name mangling suse performs on packages. For some reason, the 
package names follow the 8.3 msdos naming convention, as if that wasn't bad 
enough, the name of the package _inside_ the rpm (where it doesn't matter to
the filesystem at all) is _also_ 8,3. Frankly, this sucks. There are some other
issues with suse that I won't bore you with, but the crux of the issue is that 
I am considering switching to debian and have a few questions before I take the
plunge. 
 1) How "good" is laptop support ? apm, pcmcia, etc 
 2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables
 	is this stable enough for general use ?
 3) Can I use the stable dist, and add the unstable/testing packages
 	I want, like latest gnome, without too many problems or is it 
	either/or?
 4) How difficult is it to build deb packages from tarballs? ie 
 	./configure;make; -> make a deb. Since I am likely to want to
	play with code that has no current .deb
 5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs?

That should cover it for now, thanks for your time

-- 
Jim Richardson
	Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
WWW.eskimo.com/~warlock
	Linux, because life's too short for a buggy OS.