On 09/03/2007 02:31 AM, Rickard Lindberg wrote:
Thank you guys for all the information. I might try a dist upgrade to sid, and if that is not working well, I might do a complete reinstall of etch.Does anyone have any experience running the 'testing' release? I watched 'The Technology Behind Debian's Testing Release' from google video yesterday, and in the end of the presentation he mentioned that in the future, it might be possible to run a stable release, but at the same time install some packages from unstable. Does anyone know anything about that? When will it be available? Is someone is working on it?Again, thanks for all the helpful information.
That can be done now--with some caveats.I'm using Sarge, but I've installed a very few packages from Etch and Lenny; these are mostly Perl (and Python) scripts and documentation, and I always use the aptitude interactive environment before installing, because I want to see if something will break my system.
So installing scripts and documentation from a different distribution is somewhat safe, so long as you avoid compiled programs that require compiled libraries.
And I also have installed some packages from the excellent www.backports.org (which I need to remember to donate some money to).
However, if there is not an acceptable backport for the software you want, and the software is a compiled program that links against compiled libraries, and it's in Sid, the only safe way to get that software is to compile the source.
You can grab the source using 'apt-get source <packagename>' and compile it for your platform. Read "man 8 apt-get" if you haven't already.