On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 11:49, Anthony DiSante wrote: --snip-- > 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.
All of these have the most recent available versions already available in unstable, so it's better to just use unstable then. > 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, this is what unstable is for. The easiest way to use it is to open up /etc/apt/sources.list, and change any instances of 'woody' to 'sid' and any instances of 'stable' to 'unstable'. (woody/stable and sid/unstable are the same so you could use either of each pair) If you want XFree 4.3 you'll also want to use experimental. Add the following to your sources.list: deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main Then you'll want to look at either pinning, or using something like -t with apt-get. (That's what I do.) So to install the xf86 4.3 server for example, you'd do something like: apt-get install -t experimental xserver-xfree86 Note that unless versions are specifically specified in the dependencies, you'll most likely end up with a mixture of 4.2 and 4.3 X packages. This isn't really a bad thing, but if you want to be thorough you'll want to look at pinning. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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