As always, with the unstable version (potato), you're taking a risk installing it that on the day you decide to upgrade, any of the packages might be very broken.
As of a few weeks ago, there was a boot-floppies for potato. I used it to install a machine and they worked with a couple of bugs, which were already in the Bug Tracking System before I got there to put them in. :) But they did work... then. I don't know if they're up-to-date right now, though. There's also been some discussion on debian-cd recently about potato CD-ROM images, but they sound like they're still quite unstable from the discussions there. Perhaps someone can correct me if any of this is incorrect. To upgrade a slink system with a working internet connection to potato is relatively easy: First off, make sure you're familiar with dselect, apt, and dpkg somewhat... this information can be confusing as all get-out if you're new to Debian's package system and haven't done any of this. Make sure that dselect is using apt or if you're just using apt-get for packages that it's all working properly with slink first... In other words, what I'm saying is make sure your APT is working properly before you do any of this! Then: Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and change the lines that start with "deb" to have the paths for potato instead of slink. One of mine that hasn't been edited yet to go to my favorite mirror site yet, is below. (I made sure to throw the plug in there for using the mirrors... everyone uses the main servers, and there are plenty of close/fast mirrors out there for all to use!) (BY THE WAY, kudos to the netselect package maintainer... very useful little proggie to find a nearby/quick mirror site. Folks, try it out!) deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free deb http://pandora.debian.org/debian-non-US potato/non-US main contrib non-free ***NOTE: The directory structure of the archives changes slightly between slink and potato. Okay now as root run : apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade I've done this probably ten times or more. Sometimes it works properly, sometimes downloads fail and all that stuff. If you have a really slow net connection, it can be quite a long time for this to finish... in the order of, "set it up and let it run overnight." Of course, if a download fails or other error messages come up, you may need to be there at the console to start it up again. To recover from most problems just re-run the apt-get dist-upgrade again. In one case, I could tell that the installation scripts were just plain being run out of order due to a failed download of one of the packages on a machine, a re-run of the apt-get took care of it, as it went out and got that file (finally) and finished up the job. It's a pretty resiliant tool. Hopefully this helps, feel free to ask questions along the way if you're confused, and remember there's no guarantee of a working system after you upgrade to "unstable"... :) It's been broken before, it'll be broken again! But I still enjoy it more than slink... Nate, [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 04:26:51AM -0000, Pollywog wrote: > Is there a way to install Potato via ppp when I have only a slink CD and the > base floppies for slink? Can I download some Potato base floppy images? > > thanks > > -- > Andrew > > ----------------------------- > GnuPG Public KeyID: 0x48109681 > *we all live downstream* > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null >
