Gentlepeople, Some guidance please?
_If_ tomorrow, I were to sit down at my 486DX, 66, 24Mb RAM, 514Mb HDD computer and attempt a dselect ftp upgrade beyond Slink (Debian 2.1). Which bodes the greater likelihood of a successful upgrade: Frozen, Potato or Woody? Though I have a year's Red Hat installing, upgrading and kerneling experience, I have only about three week's experience with Debian, and that mostly shooting in the dark. I cannot tell you how much this list has helped me already! I installed Debian off an ISO a friend burned for me with only stable/main apps included, to which I added ftp downloads to disk of stable/contrib, stable/non-free and stable/non-US and got acquainted with dselect. I'm using the 2.0.38 kernel that came with the package I have the 2.1.125 kernel on board but not compiled yet. My partition table looks like this: / 50Mb 23Mb Available /usr 512Mb 190Mb Available /var 50Mb 21Mb Available /home 150Mb 56Mb Available swap 50Mb I've tried upgrading with apt-get, but it complains about too little space in /var. Will similar limitations arise with dselect ftp? Thanks to this user-list, X is performing nicely now. I have a working Apache-SSL server, again thanks to this list and the openssl-user list. I added w3m as an ssl-capable browser alongside lynx which came with the Debian package. And that's about it - no sound, no netscape, no games. I like the ruggedness of Debian so far. I can concentrate on stretching my own envelope without worrying about the system falling apart under every keystroke. Now I want to go further. My motivations for upgrading are a newer kernel, newer packages and newer libraries, in particular a libc6 newer than 2.0.7 because other packages I want depend on it. If I'm going to do all that I might as well do an OS upgrade. While I have used this configuration to get started with Debian, my intended use for it is as a firewall for two servers from which I host several websites. I've read the manpages, docs and HOWTO's, but any tips on components I'm going to need for that would be a big help. I also want to save some space for a modest C, Perl and Java programming base. I want to develop in the Debian environment but I don't think I know half enough to convert my other machines over from Red Hat yet. I'm hoping I'll feel differently about that come June. In May, I'll be switching from a dial-up 56k modem connection to SDSL. At that time I will probably purchase the most 'stable' set of Debian CD's available. But I want to learn what I'll need and make my mistakes now, also flatten my learning curve as much as possible before 'show time'. Any and all suggestions would be very welcome, even if it's overwhelmingly "Stick with Slink!" I apologize for the length and I'm sure some unavoidable ignorances in my request. By the way, who's this girl Tia? She seems very popular and I'd really like to meet her. Thanks (in advance :), montefin
