On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
To move to the testing tree, all you have to do is edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file. For the most part you can just s/stable/testing/g, but you will have to remove the security.debian.org line that is near the end.
Once you have done that,
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade
Ahhh, MUCH better. That helps quite a bit.
OK, so, here's a dumb question:
Rather than:
a) install woody b) upgrade to testing (which I'm assuming will become sarge?)
Can I make ISO's of "testing"? After brief reading, I'm assuming "jigdo" would be envolved. Am I on the right track?
Helps, thx!
Honestly, while I am a big fan of Debian, I don't run it on my desktop (I run OS X). I am surprised that selecting a desktop system didn't install X. It should be fairly simple, one command you will want to use is apt-cache, it allows you to search for packages that are available. So to find the exact name for X....
apt-cache search xfree
Which comes back with xfree86-common being what you want.
That was the wierd part. xfree86-common *WAS* installed, but not servers-xfree86, which I found unusual. Like I say, I figured it out after a half an hour of twiddling.
What struck me as odd was that they beat partitioning, and base install TO DEATH in the manual, but didn't even really mention X.
But, hey, learning is good, adventure is good, and new things are good. It's all good.
After I'd upgraded to testing, and after a few deft apt-gets for some libraries I was missing (xft2, libxml2, etc) I was able to compile openbox-3.0-rc4 and get it installed and working, which I was pretty pleased with.
As well, I'm now running kernel 2.4.22, with a quick apt-get and fixup to the lilo.conf file.
I've still got some learning to do, but I can see that this might be pretty sweet. My goal is to try running it on one of my boxen here at home for a solid three months before I even consider looking at something else. I think once I get used to saying apt-get install instead of rpm -Fvh I'll be fine.
Now, my only other goal is to wean myself off of pine (I know, my bad, not really free, etc) and learn mutt...
I'll be up in The Pas on Tuesday, so I won't be at the next MUUG meeting.
Thanks to both Shawn and Tim for answering my questions. Personally, I'm beginning to think that changing distros once every couple of years is a good thing for your ego. It's nice to be reminded that, no matter how much you think you know about GNU/Linux, there's always something more to learn.
That is, at the very core of it, why we all run GNU/Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, etc instead of Windows, isn't it? Because it's interesting, challenging, and always evolving.
Scott