begin Rahul Agarwal quotation: > Thanks for you reply. Yes I am using potato. Would you really recommend > using Woody for a novice? What kind of problems could I run into. Also > do I need to rebuild the system for istalling Woody or it can be > installed over potato.
You certainly don't need to rebuild the system to switch to Woody; you just edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file to add the testing branch, then dselect or apt-get can move you over with relatively little trouble. Unfortunately, I don't really remember if I ran into any problems in doing that, as it was quite a while ago, but in theory it's supposed to be a simple transition. As for whether Woody is appropriate for a novice, well, that probably depends on how sophisticated a novice you are. If you're reasonably computer-literate (enough to install a Debian system from scratch in the first place), then it shouldn't be too bad. The main potential problem with the testing branch is that it's always possible that some new package might break things... that's why it's called "testing". However, the likelihood of things breaking so badly that you have to rebuild the system is pretty minimal. New packages don't enter testing until they've survived at least a few days of use in the unstable branch, so it's quite infrequent that anything really disastrous happens in Woody. If the machine in question is a mission-critical system that can't afford to have problems, then it probably ought to run Potato. If it's your personal workstation, then I'd choose Woody or Sid (unstable) according to how willing, able, and inclined you are to deal with the problems that can crop up in the unstable branch. Craig
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