On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:04:15PM -0800, Jim Richardson wrote: : 1) How "good" is laptop support ? apm, pcmcia, etc
This is kernel stuff, what are you looking for the Distro to do to/with it. It's there to use, I've set up a few laptops with Debian and had no complaints. If I recall apm isn't in the stock Debian kernel (or wasn't), but I tend to roll my own anyway... : 2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables : is this stable enough for general use ? general use yes, mission critical, I'd say not tested enough yet. I don't know of any breakage (other than a little learning curve on the config) and I use it at home and on my laptop (both debian testing/unstable though I've heard it's not too hard to set up with stable). : 3) Can I use the stable dist, and add the unstable/testing packages : I want, like latest gnome, without too many problems or is it : either/or? Depends on the package and the current state of unstable/testing. If the package relies on a new version of glibc you'll have problems, but alot of stuff can be cross installed. : 4) How difficult is it to build deb packages from tarballs? ie : ./configure;make; -> make a deb. Since I am likely to want to : play with code that has no current .deb there are tools that make it stupid simple. Also the "alien" utility will take and rpm or tarball and convert it to a .deb (or other way round), this is best done only with non critical packages as it doesn't rearrange the file system paths (debian uses /etc/init.d rpms /etc/rc.d/init.d and other such vaugeries) : 5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs? if you can still get your hands on the .deb that was working for you you can force a downgrade. If you stick to stable you'll never have to do this, with unstable maybe once a quarter something will break bad (but hey that's why they call it unstable), testing should be almost on par with stable, but it's a relatively new designation, so I can't say yet (no crisis for me in the month or two I've had a machine tracking it) HTH, -Jon
