I have never had any problem at a system level. Certainly not with any instability with the minor upgrades. What I usually do is upgrade from stable to Debian testing about a year or so from what I expect to be the release date. By then its been 'testing' for a year or more. Then a year or 18 months later my version turns into stable, and I stick with it for another year or so. So basically I am going 2-3 years between major releases, like from Etch to Lenny. In between I do updates every few months.
Occasionally you will find a package will become problematic. KDE4 caused some of this, many of the KDE apps had to be rewritten quite radically and that introduced bugs in one I use quite a bit. It was easy enough just to go back to the last version manually however. I use gdebi for the few occasions its necessary to install packages other than from the repositories. The kind of thing Richmond is talking about though, its never happened. Hardware upgrades are pretty simple too. The last ones I did as was recommended to Richmond, dd to mirror the hard drive, then install the new hard drive in the new system and boot. Mostly it works just fine. I did have one issue on one occasion doing this, think it was the display drivers. I have also found as suggested to Richmond that doing a clean install leaves things pretty much OK, as long as you leave /home alone on its own partition. There is a price with Debian. It is not as user friendly as some, the admin center you get with Mandriva or Magleia or PCLinux is far more user friendly. It lags behind a bit, you will not be running the latest version of everything. I very rarely care about that. But its very very solid, its a couple of years or three between major releases which is nice. Its tested to death before it becomes classified as 'stable', and its tested as a whole distribution. Gnome has become a real problem as Richmond and others have found. I think they have gone mad and are now making things you need every day harder and harder, or sometimes impossible, to do. For instance, gdm3, you now have to edit text files to do autologin, and how exactly you set up xdmcp in gdm3 I have no idea. Any cutting edge gnome based distro is going to drop you in this. I think the answer for most people is probably xfce. For me personally its fluxbox. -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/OT-Onanistic-Ocelot-tp3904410p3907614.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
