>>>>> "Sven" == Sven Heinicke <sven@research.nj.nec.com> writes: Sven> I'm not a linux newbie but I am a debion newbie. I would of Sven> gotten into it a year ago had woody install docs beed easily found Sven> from the web site. I don't think woody was even installable a year ago. You would have needed to start with potato, edited /etc/apt/sources.list, and then done a dist-upgrade. (Although woody probably should have been released about a year ago. The problems have been well documented, and I believe the developers will be discussing it after they all recover from the big parties they'll have to celebrate woody's release, which should be real soon now.) Ooh. I just looked at the Debian web page again. http://www.debian.org/releases/ actually contains some really nice information about what each release phase is, including FAQ pointers to "what is ``testing'' and how it becomes ``stable''". The testing page, http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/ contains basically all the information (or pointers to the information) that you would need to know to upgrade from potato to woody. (Sure, a lot of that is wrapped in the "Read the apt-get(8) and the sources.list(5) manual pages for more information." statement at the bottom, but anyone running testing had better be comfortable reading man pages.) Sven> I followed the docs, installed potato and I thought Debian sucked Sven> because of the 2.2 kernel and other things. Not until a couple of Sven> months ago a new debion fan programmer started working here and Sven> hand held me through the first couple steps. Now I'm a fan Sven> running woody! Sven The thing about Debian is that breakages most commonly occur in the packaging, rather than the programs themselves. "stable" means that no such breakages will occur. In testing, such breakages should be rarer than unstable, but may still occur. If you aren't running stable, you should either know about how Debian does things, or have a local guru to help you through problems. While in your case, you might have been able to worked through problems on your own (or been lucky enough to not run into any problems), I think that Debian wants to take the more cautious approach, and let newbies just run stable, and by the time you hear about testing, you know how the system works. -- Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
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