Hi I have used Poatato on a lot of different machines for a long time now (app. 7 months.) and I have never hard a harder time than now. After fighting with kernel 2.3.40 on potato with a lot of OpenGL stuff included I decided it was to unstable (reboot every 3 hours or so) and wanted to reinstall me machine using the 'good old' 2.2.14 kernel and potato. Last night I decided to reboot with current debian-installation disks for i386 and get the rest from the net. Well everything ran smoothly until I rebooted. Just before I get a prompt Init reports that it's respawning to fast... I switch to getty-2 and do a check on what is running. Nothing of importence. I check inittab and see something like this: '1:2345:respawn:/bin/sh /root/.bash_profile...' which I uncomment and add '1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1' which works. Because I didn't start Debian the normal way nothing is really configured nd I have to do the stuff myself 8-0 I run dselect do get what I need but something breaks on the way and I don't get bin86 and other importent things. I rerun dselect and get the missing stuff (I thought). Somehow Perl seemes to break a lot of dependencies and I end up with a half installed Gnome and missing X-libs... I fix most of it and compile a new kernel with support for SMP and get X running. I create my default useraccount and get my home-dir via nfs only to find out that my fonts are twisted, xscreensaver cannot be installed without deinstalling half of the Gnome-stuff. I believe it's Perl thats busting it up again but I'm not sure.
So my conclusion from this experience: Unless the chosen ones (developers) work really hard on potato it's not going to be out as stable soon. To be honest: This was my worst experience with Debian and it seems like it's not over because I'll have to compile a lot of packeges on my own to fix the dependencies... I still look forward to stable and will still continue to use Debian for a long time but some of my confidence in the chosen ones have been lost. -- Sven Esbjerg http://www.dina.dk/~joker
