On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 09:17:58AM -0600, Dave Babb wrote: > Good Morning, > > > My current distribution of choice is Arch Linux. Arch is too techie for my > daughter, who wants to admin her own system. > > I used jigdo to download all 14 CD images for "Sarge". > That was not necessary. Only the first disk was necessary, or even the netinst image. > I backed up her /home/* directory to CD and began the install last night. I'm > puzzled. > If /home was already on a separate partition, this was also unnecssary. If it was not on a separate partition, it should be. > > Default Kernel still in the 2.4 series? If you press F2 or F3 (I forget which) at the boot prompt, it will show you how to get a 2.6 kernel. It is that way because 2.4 is consistently better across all the architectures that Debian supports (not necessarily true for i386, but true when you consider how well the kernel supports all of the architectures). > An old Gnome? 2.8 has only been out for what, 6 months? It's really not that old. Besides, one criterion for a package to make it into the stabe release is that it must be syncrhonized across all architectures. That means that it must install and run on all the architectures Debian officially supports. > An old KDE? Same as above. Porting huge packages so that they work on 13 different architectures and variants is not easy. > > In fact, most of the packages are behind the times, some by a little, some by a > lot. > I don't think that is true. *Some* packages are behind, but then not every Debian package maintainer has tons of free time to spend repackaging new upstream releases, especially if the new releases are relatively minor. > I didn't expect this in a release hot off of the presses. > > The package system on the Debian website still shows KDE 3.3.2 as the version > of choice. I didn't see an option to upgrade to a newer version either in > testing, unstable, or stable. > Because the packaging of KDE 3.4 is still in the experimental phase. You can get the experimental packages from Alioth. Search the rest of today's list traffic, as the link has already been posted. > > I have NO INTENTION of flame-baiting, or other immature behavior. I do have > genuine puzzlement as to why the old stuff instead of fresh stuff. > > > Would the Debian community please respond or elighten me? Also, please understand that the objective behind a stable Debian release is to provide a constant environment on which a system administrator can rely to ensure that the machine's behavior does not change without his knowledge. Compare that to Fedora or other Linux distros. When a security update comes out as part of a new upstream release, they don't bother to backport it. They simply tell their users to download the new version. This can be a royal pain in a server environment or in a case where you have deployed hundreds or thousands of PCs. If that is not to your liking, you can always use testing or unstable, which are quite suitable for use in a workstation or desktop capacity if you are only managing one or a small number of machines. Be aware, though, that currently testing and unstable are in quite a bit of flux becuase of the new package transitions that are starting after the lift of the freeze. -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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