knx-hdinstall vs dist-upgrade. taking bets.

[S. Loisel]

Dear Debianites,

I've decided to install Knoppix on my hard disk. It has been suggested 
before that this is a good way to get an initial installation of Debian 
up and running, and it's true that the process is very seamless.

I want to try out Debian due to its much vaunted ease of maintenance and 
distribution upgrades. However, after three installations of Knoppix to 
my hard disk, it seems like I'm unable to get on the bandwagon.

Starting from Knoppix 3.3, apt-get update && apt-get upgrade does 
something reasonable looking, but apt-get dist-upgrade downloads 
hundreds of megabytes, uninstalls most of my OS, and then leaves it in 
an unusable, non-gui state. I also tried with Knoppix 3.1 (because I had 
such a disk lying around) and the results were far worse.

For instance, when I did the dist-upgrade with Knoppix 3.3, it promptly 
removed anything kde related (or nearly everything?) and installed gcc 
3.3. Then I asked it for some kde back, and it complains about weird 
versions missing and says I should be reporting bugs. I don't want to be 
reporting bugs just yet because I'm a newbie, so I must be doing 
something wrong somehow. The weirder thing (to me) is that dselect and 
apt-get dist-upgrade don't seem to agree on what needs to be done.

I realize this is probably not the Debian way of doing things, but I am 
an adventurer in the jungle with a whip and a gun, and I'm looking for a 
golden statue. Or something.

At any rate, could anyone give me an overview, initial pointers, 
walkthrough, howto, whatever, on going from a knoppixified initial 
Debian installation to a dist-upgraded modern Debian desktop including 
all the latest whizbang? I've never administrated Debian before, but 
I've been using RH for a long time (since the 4.x days.)

Thanks,

Sébastien Loisel
PS. Please cc me in your replies, I'm not subscribing to the list, but 
I'll keep an eye on it via web archives.



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