On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 09:53:16PM +0200, Justin Hartman wrote: > Hi Guys > > For sake of not repeating the same topics in this thread I will start > off by saying that I am also a recent convert to Debian Testing PPC > from Ubuntu 6.10. My primary motivation for moving to Debian was as a > result of a recent decision by Canonical to drop support for PPC as of > the end of version 6.10. that's sad news as I recently got my mom to leave MS by putting ubuntu on an old PPC mac I got ahold of. oh well. > > Assuming I don't have Etch RC1 will an apt-get distro-upgrade bring me > up to RC1 or will security updates do the job? actually, it will probably bring you past RC1. I don't know where etch is at currently relative ro RC1, but etch is still a moving target. as such, dist-upgrade should probably be a regular regimen for etch. > > Finally I would like to ask, as a newcomer, will future upgrades to > either the new testing or unstable versions of Debian be simple or > will a re-install be required? I'm not sure how the testing and > unstable versions are viewed in light of distro-upgrade so any clarity > would be appreciated. once you have installed debian, you should never have to reinstall (unless you're going to DOWNgrade, or maybe on a mobo change). you may freely, though not always easily, migrate you're way through the various "flavors" of debian as you choose. And, you can do it all with the apt system. basically, you tell the apt system which version of debian you want to run -- whether "stable" "testing" "unstable" or by name "sarge" "etch" "sid" etc and then the apy system will bring you packages that belong to that version. obviously there is much more detail... read the excellent documentation on the web, in the package debian-reference-en or on this list. oh, and of course, the man pages. the primer: tell apt which release you want by specifying it in /etc/apt/apt_preferences with APT::Default-Release "<insert name here>"; then edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the correct parts of the repository. for example, to get etch use: deb http://<mirror address/debian/ etc main [contrib] [non-free] this tells apt where to find the packages. the named releases (sarge, etch, etc) are the names of various stable releases. etch is the name of the next stable release, due out soon. if you point to "etch" you will actually get what is currently "testing" and will follow it into "stable". If you point to "sarge" you will get what is currently "stable", but will follow sarge into "oldstable". If you point to stable, you will stay in stable, which means an automatic upgrade to etch when that goes stable. If you point to testing, you will be running the future "etch" until it moves stable, and then you will move on from it as new packages filter into testing. "sid" and unstable are synonymous. you reference distro-upgrade, by which I assume you mean dist-upgrade. This is one of the options for apt that controls what apt can do to while upgrading packages. dist-upgrade, at a minimum, allows apt to potentially remove packages as part of an upgrade process where plain old "upgrade" does not. read the man pages for more details. now that I've probably thoroughly confused you, enjoy ;) A
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