On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:04:15PM -0800, Jim Richardson wrote: > I am considering switching to debian and have a few questions before > I take the plunge. > 1) How "good" is laptop support ? apm, pcmcia, etc
Very good. I actually don't have much experience with APM in other distributions, but Debian supports my Sony VAIO as well as Win98 does. Suspend/resume to/from RAM and disk work fine. The pcmcia packages make it easy to switch between networks when moving around (I am regularly on a DHCP wireless LAN, a static IP LAN, and a DHCP LAN, and all works fine). Of course, most of this stuff is distribution independant. A lot of it just depends on the kernel. > 2) I want to use 2.4.x kernel to get access to good usb and iptables > is this stable enough for general use ? Yup. I have switched all my machines to 2.4.x. These machines range from servers to workstations to laptops. The only instability I've yet experienced was on a modified version of 2.4.2 (I added the USAGI project's IPv6 patch, and sometimes experienced hangs when opening an SSH connection to an IPv6 host). > 3) Can I use the stable dist, and add the unstable/testing packages > I want, like latest gnome, without too many problems or is it > either/or? Yes. It's often wise to build them from source, though. They are most likely linked against different (not entirely compatible) versions of stuff like libc. apt-get makes it easy to fetch the source for a package and rebuild it for your system. Unfortunately, support for compile-time dependencies is not yet available in stable versions of apt. That is changing, but it's not ready. So you'll often need to hunt down the necessary packages in order to build a package. Looking at the list of regular binary dependencies will help. > 4) How difficult is it to build deb packages from tarballs? ie > ./configure;make; -> make a deb. Since I am likely to want to > play with code that has no current .deb It's well documented in various places at http://www.debian.org/devel/ > 5) Can I "downgrade" packages easily if they cause probs? > Yes, but apt-get doesn't automate that. You have to fetch the package by hand and install it with dpkg -i. That will smoothly downgrade it for you. Moving to an unfamiliar distribution is always a bit hairy. Some people run out of patence before they're familiar with it. Give it a little while, post questions on this list, read docs, etc, and you'll have a good time. 8^) noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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