Re: Helping the newbie
Hello
Jeremy Davis (<jeremy@slicenet.net>) wrote:
> I am in the process of learning the the subtle differences in debian
> compared to my main linux distro, which is Slackware. So I believe
> that I am going to move to debian because of apt and all that it
> implies :)
> But I do have a question. Am I missing something in apt-get when
> updating the packages. I noticed that perl 5.6 is kind of old as well
> as the apache 1.3.26. Are the debian packages not kept up-to-date?
> If not maybe I should move to something else? Sorry for my ignorance
> on the subject, but I am willing to change this ignorance curve :)
The stable distribution of Debian (3.0 aka Woody) was published last
summer. The packages in the stable distribution are kept up to date as
in "Security updates will be made available when needed", and other
bugs are fixed when new revisions of Woody are published.
Newer versions like Apache 2 will probably in the next release (Sarge),
but not in Woody. And it is possible that it will take another year
until Sarge becomes stable. If you want to use Debian, you have several
choices:
1. Use the stable version (Woody), be on the safe side when it comes to
security updates, but use program versions that are older
2. Use Woody with backports. There are inofficial updates for Woody
available, like KDE 3, Gnome 2 and many more. Take a look at
<http://www.apt-get.org>. However, these packages are not supported by
the Debian security team.
3. Use the testing version (Sarge) or unstable (Sid). Both have newer
packages, Sid is quite up to date, but especially in Sid things can be
broken for a while, and although from time to time security updates
become available (like updates kernel source), it is basically
unsupported by the Debian security team. Sarge or Sid are usable for
desktop systems (at least many people use it, I use Woody with KDE 3),
but I would not set up a public server with them.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
--
Andreas Janssen
andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674
Registered Linux User #267976
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