On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:49:57PM -0500, Anthony DiSante wrote:
Hello,
I just installed Debian stable the other day, and with the help of some of the folks on the list here, got it upgraded (apt-get dist-upgrade) to the sarge "testing" packages. But some things, like mozilla, and the alsa audio drivers, and gaim, and xfree86, either didn't get installed, or didn't get upgraded to the current versions.
I found apt-get.org, and see that there are lots of debian packages available from various sources there. But some things, for example mozilla, are available right from the mozilla site as binaries that have always "just worked" in my experience. Is it bad to install mozilla that way, completely bypassing the apt system?
Likewise for gaim, and the alsa audio drivers, I've never had any trouble building them from source on my Slackware system, so I'd guess they'd build fine on my Debian system. And I want to go to XFree86 4.3, but dist-upgrade only gave me 4.2.
I definitely want to have the latest versions for certain packages, like these ones I've mentioned. But if I install them manually, is that a problem? Isn't my whole apt system going to then be out-of-sync with what's actually installed on my box? Or is there a way to make apt give me the very latest versions (is that what "unstable" is)?
Yes. I think unstable is what you want. see releases guide
http://www.debian.org/releases/index.en.html
to know what things you can get is http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
apt has -t option, with which you can specify the target-release
you like to get. details on this, see apt-get(8)
but there is some things that you can't get with apt-system. I don't know how do-it-yourself package affect debian-system. I like to know that, too.
thanks.
Basically, that is what /usr/local is for. /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin come first in the search order (ahead of /usr/bin and /usr/sbin). AFAIK, no officical Debian packages mess with the /usr/local tree. This is where I install all third party software, like JDK, net beans, America's Army, Netscape 4.8, thie WINE and wxWindows latest CVS versions, Thunderbird (before it was packaged in Debian, and so on.
HTH,
-Roberto
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