Re: Considering switching to debian
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:04:15PM -0800, Jim Richardson wrote:
: 1) How "good" is laptop support ? apm, pcmcia, etc
This is kernel stuff, what are you looking for the Distro to do
to/with it. It's there to use, I've set up a few laptops with Debian
and had no complaints. If I recall apm isn't in the stock Debian
kernel (or wasn't), but I tend to roll my own anyway...
: 2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables
: is this stable enough for general use ?
general use yes, mission critical, I'd say not tested enough yet. I
don't know of any breakage (other than a little learning curve on the
config) and I use it at home and on my laptop (both debian
testing/unstable though I've heard it's not too hard to set up with
stable).
: 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?
Depends on the package and the current state of unstable/testing. If
the package relies on a new version of glibc you'll have problems, but
alot of stuff can be cross installed.
: 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
there are tools that make it stupid simple. Also the "alien" utility
will take and rpm or tarball and convert it to a .deb (or other way
round), this is best done only with non critical packages as it
doesn't rearrange the file system paths (debian uses /etc/init.d rpms
/etc/rc.d/init.d and other such vaugeries)
: 5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs?
if you can still get your hands on the .deb that was working for you
you can force a downgrade. If you stick to stable you'll never have
to do this, with unstable maybe once a quarter something will break
bad (but hey that's why they call it unstable), testing should be
almost on par with stable, but it's a relatively new designation, so I
can't say yet (no crisis for me in the month or two I've had a machine
tracking it)
HTH,
-Jon
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