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Re: lenny comfortable yet?



On Fri July 6 2007 07:19:20 pm Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> I ran Etch for about 6 months before it became stable since my new box
> required it.  I'm runing amd64.

I've always considered myself a "stable" man, but it never seems to work out 
that way.. ;)

> One of the main reasons for buying a new box was, believe it or not,
> that my 486 had difficulty with all the over-graphiced web pages I
> needed to access.
>
> Now I'm finding that a lot of the sites I need use flash not just for
> decoration but the main content.  Of course, Etch amd64 doesn't have the
> wrapper that allows me to use a flash player without using an i386
> chroot.

I never did do a chroot but I do even to this day have a small stable-i386 
partition installed. I haven't used it in a while now, I think I can probably 
drop it now without missing it.

> I'm still trying to get it to work but if I can't, I'm wondering about
> just moving up to Lenny.

I went from etch to lenny recently. I didn't see anything interesting so I 
moved up to sid about an hour later.

Sid sure seems stable at the moment. I'm sure there are bugs about but I just 
don't see any. There is the odd package that doesn't install because of 
depends and what not but few and far between. Sid looks a lot like release 
material to me now. Better wait and see what tomorrow has in store.. :))

> I know from Etch that testing is not stable.  Things stop working for a
> while and then a fix comes down the pipe.  In the mean time, use
> something else.  I undertand all that.  However, since this is my main
> box, I don't want to find that something happens to kill it requiring a
> reinstall or something.  I'm on dialup.

I keep an etch-archives, lenny-archives and sid-archives around the drives and 
symlink to /var/cache/apt/archives as appropriate just in case I feel the 
need to change. Still a big job to re-install but it saves a fair bit of 
downloading.

> My daily must-haves really are mild: base system, a brower (lynx or
> links2), an editor, mutt, exim, fetchmail, and I like mc, and aptitude
> (or apt-get or even dselect or plain dpkg in a pinch), along with
> ppp/chat.  It wouldn't bother me if anything else stopped working for a
> while, but if I loose the ability to dial out, loose email, then I'm in
> difficulty.

I rarely have difficulty with any console app (I use quite a few of them) in 
testing/unstable, it's usually the x/gnome/kde stuff that takes time to get 
in place. Haven't used ppp for some time though.
 
> I know that, just like mutual funds, past performance does not guarantee
> future performance, but what has the experience been like for
> non-developers over the past couple of months?  Do people think that
> Lenny is ready for a desktop run by a knowledgeable user?

Sid has been a bump and grind, just as expected. I had to remember how to use 
apt-get b/c aptitude was having issues (runs great now) but if it wasn't so I 
probably wouldn't enjoy it.. :)

Not to sure about lenny. I'm going to install it over the weekend and have a 
look and see. I think lenny would be easier on the modem line. Sid has had a 
few openoffice updates in the last few weeks. The current one (2.2.1-5) looks 
good to get into lenny but we'll see.



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