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Re: Pre-Port Usability Question



Dave Babb wrote:
> The responses indicate that Debian is a distro to take into any server 
> room, deploy it, and not loose sleep about something blowing up when you 
> leave.

Definitely one of the strongest points.  But you are missing another
strong point of Debian...

> I've already rolled out the new Debian onto Katia's PC. Now I'll 
> re-install, play the "F1" game, and get her into a new kernel.

Stop!  Wait!  Don't press another key.  Why do you think you need to
reinstall?  To the Debian user that is anathema.  You said it was
running but had installed the 2.4 kernel instead of the 2.6 kernel.
If you have a running system then just install the later kernel that
you want or install the later KDE that you want.  Needing to reinstall
is a critical failure.  Reinstalling is what you do on *other*
distros.  Like needing to reboot a MS machine.  You just don't _do_
that with Debian.

If you have a system running the linux-2.4 kernel and you want to
install the linux-2.6 kernel then simply install it and reboot to it.

  apt-cache search kernel-image 2.6 686
  kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686

  aptitude install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686

If you are living with sources.list pointing to unstable sid and want
to keep up (as you seem to want) you can install the 2.6 meta package
and have it pull in new kernels as they are available.

  apt-get install kernel-image-2.6-686

I don't recommend that for your daughter's machine.  But you sound
like this is what you would like for your machine.

> You see... My current distro on my box is Arch Linux, based upon Crux, 
> is exactly the opposite. Bleeding edge, short testing cycle, deploy and 
> respond to things that go boom-boom. And being a engineer, I enjoy a 
> little techie pull your hair out stuff now and then. The boom-boom stuff 
> has helped me sharpen my skills.
> 
> Often, we have new KDE packages on an average of two days before the KDE 
> site even announces it.

You would want to put the following in your /etc/apt/sources.list file
and then pull the latest kde directly out of the development area.
That is not for me but you sound up to the task.

  deb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.0/ ./

The other thing that several people have commented upon is your
downloading of the 14 CDs.  It is great that you are having good
success with jigdo.  But if you have a fast enough connection to
download those cds then you have a plenty fast connection to install
just what is needed directly from the network.

In the future never download all 14 disks again.  Only download the
first disk, because you need something to boot the system from, and
then install the rest from the network directly.  It will save a lot
of time because you won't be downloading what you are not installing.
It saves a lot of disks because I doubt any single user ever installs
all of the packages.  (Can't really, because for packages such as
Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, etc. you pick only one of the set.)

Of course this is the last time you will ever need to do the disk
installation.  Because once a machine is up and running you never
reinstall again.  Just upgrade it from then on.

Bob

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