I'm a new Debian user after using RedHat, lfs and my own small (and thus very incomplete) distro. I'm especially happy with the great packaging system and the large number of packages which can easily be installed using dselect. At first, dselect was a bit disorienting, but it handles dependencies nicely. However, I'm using the stable branch and I am happy with that except from the fact that I'd like to play AVI-files. So that is in unstable.
You can install mplayer for playing AVI files. Just add to sources.list
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ stable main
and do
apt-cache get mplayer-{your_architecture}
apt-cache search mplayer
will show architectures available.
Or you can download mplayer sources from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
there are also instructions how-to make yourself installable deb file.
Big deal. And it depends on the new libc6. Ok, no problem. But even if I don't select anything dselect, it wants to upgrade 244 packages, install 26 and remove 34 and leave 3 not upgraded. I don't like that. If I want to upgrade to unstable, I'll let dselect (or apt-get) know. Now, I only want to install avifile-player and its dependencies without upgrading my whole system. If it needs the new libc6, I'm happy to install that too. But not a whole bunch of other things just to let me keep kword, for example. I couldn't get apt-get to work either, it does a better job not wanting to upgrade my whole system, but it will happily remove all of koffice for me.
If you want something from testing or unstable branch you must use apt-pinning. Do
echo "APT::Default-Release \"stable\";" >>apt.conf
as root in /etc/apt, add testing or unstable sources in sources.list and then do
apt-get -t unstable install whatever_package_from_unstable_you_want
or
apt-get -t testing install whatever_package_from_testing_you_want
It will install the package with its dependencies, but when you do
apt-get upgrade
it won't pull all unstable or testing.
This configuration is quite usable (I am still using it at work). For more details read man pages for apt and apt_preferences.
Have fun!
Mpiktas
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