On 30 Jun 2001 16:45:37 +1000, Mikael Gustaf Claesson wrote: > I've ordered a new notebook, and I was thinking that maybe I should try > installing Debian. But I need kernel 2.4 and I want to use ReiserFS. Does > that mean that I have to install from sid? And will that mean that the > system will be very unstable? In that case I'll probably just go with > Mandrake instead. What do you people think?
I've now converted all my boxes over to using Reiserfs as the boot filesystem. I was lucky enough to avoid all the initial data corruption bugs by instantly upgrading them to 2.4.5 (and the 2.4.5 patch from www.namesys.com). I thought through trying to upgrade them but decided that because they weren't very customised that a backup of the data and a reinstall was the best option. I can't remember where I obtained everything but here's what you can do: Grab the latest Debian reiserfs boot disks and use them to do the install. Then you'll have reiserfs as your boot partition the _easy_ way. Then add bunk's 2.4 utilities to your path. Do a distribution upgrade (apt-get -u dist-upgrade) and then you'll be able to compile/install a 2.4.5 kernel. At this point you're _still_ using stable. If you want the cutting edge software like I do then add the testing/unstable paths to your sources.list. So far it has been great apart from the pam update. And I could have avoided that if I'd paid attention to the lists instead of just blindly upgrading ASAP. If you pay attention to what you're upgrading I'd say even non-critical servers could be run on unstable, especially if you have a reason to use the latest applications (as I do). Unstable is the most modern distribution there is. I get to use all the latest software all the time without waiting for a new distribution every six months or so. It's fantastic (thanks everyone). By the way, "testing" is the least secure Debian distribution (something I was surprised to discover a few weeks ago). Both stable and unstable get security updates very quickly. It can take a while for the unstable updates to filter though to testing. Regards, Adam
