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Re: Considering switching to debian



On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:04:15PM -0800, Jim Richardson wrote:
> 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 

Very good.  I actually don't have much experience with APM in other
distributions, but Debian supports my Sony VAIO as well as Win98 does.
Suspend/resume to/from RAM and disk work fine.  The pcmcia packages make
it easy to switch between networks when moving around (I am regularly on
a DHCP wireless LAN, a static IP LAN, and a DHCP LAN, and all works
fine).  Of course, most of this stuff is distribution independant.  A
lot of it just depends on the kernel.

>  2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables
>  	is this stable enough for general use ?

Yup.  I have switched all my machines to 2.4.x.  These machines range
from servers to workstations to laptops.  The only instability I've yet
experienced was on a modified version of 2.4.2 (I added the USAGI
project's IPv6 patch, and sometimes experienced hangs when opening an
SSH connection to an IPv6 host).

>  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?

Yes.  It's often wise to build them from source, though.  They are most
likely linked against different (not entirely compatible) versions of
stuff like libc.  apt-get makes it easy to fetch the source for a
package and rebuild it for your system.  Unfortunately, support for
compile-time dependencies is not yet available in stable versions of
apt.  That is changing, but it's not ready.  So you'll often need to
hunt down the necessary packages in order to build a package.  Looking
at the list of regular binary dependencies will help.

>  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

It's well documented in various places at http://www.debian.org/devel/

>  5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs?
> 

Yes, but apt-get doesn't automate that.  You have to fetch the package
by hand and install it with dpkg -i.  That will smoothly downgrade it
for you.

Moving to an unfamiliar distribution is always a bit hairy.  Some people
run out of patence before they're familiar with it.  Give it a little
while, post questions on this list, read docs, etc, and you'll have a
good time.  8^)

noah

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