Hi Robert,
Take a look at http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ , Chapter 2 and 6 .. and browse thru the rest
if there is anything unclear.
It is all on how you approach your setup. stable is mainly for the people that don't realy care
for a system that has the bleeding edge of .. well, anything you can think of. It's most of the
time a good choice for a production enviroment, and even then it's possible to run the stable
base, and mix it with unstable. I don't realy care much for that approach, but it can be done.
And even then.. it's possible to build your own debs, but that doesn't realy solve your compile
nitty gritty issues.
unstable has the latest and the greatest.. but doesn't cave on preformance compaired to stable.
Although the debian security team doesn't watch over the unstable release (although, if I'm
not mistaken.. there is some suggestions that they are planning to.. but I'm not sure), most
of the issues are taken care of the mainters, and that's just what you get.. a lot more updates.
Steer clear of the testing release if you are not intressted in working on fixing your system,
on a regular basis.. but even then, for a testing env. .. it's amazing how low the amount of
times this realy happens is.
Read thru your APT manual, and you'll get a sarge system up and running in notime.
hf,
Mark
Robert Brinson wrote:
Currently, I am a Gentoo Linux user. It is a great distribution for people who want fine control over their system. I enjoy being able to just emerge whatever_program. However, I am getting a little tired of having to compile every little obscure library for a point update. So, I guess you could say I'm in the market for a new distro.
I have used Red Hat (not Fedora), Mandrake, and Gentoo. Of all of them, I enjoy the control I have with Gentoo. I guess I'm looking for a distro that will allow me to obtain the latest xorg or gnome or firefox without having to go through a three hour compile session. RPM is not suitable for this, as I know from experience. Red Hat and Mandrake are very picky about dependencies making an upgrade of gnome or kde nearly impossible. One ends up in the RPM equivalent of dll hell. apt-get seems well suited for my needs. That is why I am posting to this debian list. However, when I browsed the package repositories on debian.org, I was disappointed. The stable repository is woefully out of date. The latest unstable gnome is version 2.6, and xorg is not even listed. Is it possible to easily have a debian install with the latest gnome 2.8 and xorg 6.8.1? I did see a debian-based distro called ubuntu that has gnome 2.8 out of the box. However, their faq says that one should not mix mainstream debian debs with ubuntu debs. So, that distro would preclude me from taking advantage of all of the packages in the debian repository. So, does anyone have advice for this situation? Am I asking the impossible of the current state of debian?
Thanks for any insight.
Robert Brinson
"The solution to any problem -- work, love, money, whatever -- is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be." – John Gierach
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