*Ari Makela wrote: > Joey Hess writes: > > Ari Makela wrote: > > > series kernel or newer XFree86. Neither it's difficult to change the > > > kernel on the rescue floppy if the provided kernel does not support > > > hardware. If, Samba, for example, is not new enough, it's not > > > difficult to fetch the sources and compile it. > > > > Have you ever actually tried to do this? > > Yes, I've installed Slink on an exotic AST server hardware. 2.0 didn't > work. There was nothing that was hard to fix.
Maybe you find it easy. But you are relatively elite in debian knowledge. I got a notebook two months ago. The video, sound, and pcmcia are not supported by slink. I installed a minimum slink and then used another debian system to burn enough packages to upgrade on a CD (made an archive with apt-zip, I think) Then I got the pcmcia working by building a new kernel and pcmcia sources, then upgraded over my fast net connection. Maybe people who can't do that are lazy and stupid and don't deserve Debian. Maybe Linus was right. People can't ship stable Debian on new machines, but they can ship RH and SuSE. (I don't want to attack with the sarcasm, just to make a strong point). btw. I like the idea of releasing something like a semi-stable which differs mostly in that it supports new hardware. Maybe we can argue about whether the latest apache should be shipped. But I can't see how you can argue that our only stable product should not be able to run on most new machines. -- John Lapeyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tucson,AZ http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~lapeyre