moving to Debian

[Matt Greer <matthew-greer@uiowa.edu>]

Hello,

I am currently a Mandrake user and think I'd like to switch to Debian. I've 
read up a lot on Debian and like most of what I hear. I also had Debian 2.2r4 
potato installed for a while but had to bail out because I couldn't get some 
crucial things going correctly.

I think I'd be fine with potato despite the old packages. It seems most 
people want woody instead. But I do have some questions on Debian that will 
hopefully help me transistion over better.

If I did decide on woody, how exactly would I install it? I know that 
question has been asked many times, but I'm confused about the optimal way to 
do it. Most seem to suggest installing a very minimal potato (although what 
"minimal" means I'm not exactly sure, kernel, modules, bash, apt?), then do 
"apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". This would require unstable sources 
in my source.list file, right?

Does this upgrade the kernel and/or lilo? Just reboot and there's woody?

If I did stick with Potato, there's a couple things I'm not sure about. What 
is USB support like in 2.2.x kernels? Most USB documentation I can find is on 
2.4.x kernels. I tried just modprobing in usb-uhci and then going on to hid, 
etc like I would in 2.4.x, but my system totally locked up on me.

How could I install SDL in potato? I tried but found myself in an apt/dpkg 
nightmare. Lots of failed dependencies and libraries that weren't new enough. 
Would installing something like this from source affect apt in any way? Would 
I have to tell apt that SDL is installed?

Is there any documentation out there on installing Nvidia drivers for a pre 4 
X server and 2.2 kernel? Nvidia assumes you're running the latest releases.

Is there good documentation on all the package management programs? I find 
apt and all its cousins a bit confusing :) 

Sorry if I'm being too vague. I no longer have Debian installed. My computer 
is the gateway/NAT for my LAN, and people weren't willing to have their net 
connection go up and down so I could play :) (I'm looking into getting a 
dedicated server for that).


Thanks,
Matt