Ooooh! A blanket call for opinions! Finally a letter I'm qualified to respond too!
I got on Woody when it was testing because a project I was involved with was using it. We had several people from HP on the project and too a man their Unix was Debian. It was my introduction to Debian. About a month ago I wanted to start with a clean install so I downloaded the stable version of woody and installed it. I was disappointed to see that the version of kde was still 2.2 and the kernel version I had been using under woody testing (2.4.20) still wasn't available as source under woody stable. So I decided to jump to Sarge. I downloaded the CD's and blew up the install. I never did get Sarge installed directly and I spent two long hot weekends trying. My biggest problem was that my ethernet cards (Intel pro 100) were recognized but no driver was available. Finally working from a response on this mailing list I installed woody stable again, changed my apt sources, and upgraded to Sarge, where I was STILL stuck with kde 2.2! I stopped. I re-thought. I checked the archives. And I reinstalled Woody stable and added a line to my sources.list to pull the latest kde from kde.org. I found a .deb of 2.4.20 sources in testing and pulled that, built-installed-prayed, and rebooted. Now I have a nice stable machine with a pretty interface which was all I really wanted in the first place. I think most people should think twice before going to testing. If it's just one package you're desperate for then take a look at finding a back port or building from source. If you really want to TEST DEBIAN then buddy strap that helmet on, hit the gas, and go for it! If you want to USE DEBIAN to get other work, play, learning done then stick to stable. My .02 for what it's worth. John Purser -----Original Message----- From: Aaron [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 2:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Woody vs. Sarge vs. You've heard this before ;-) Hey Debian-lovers, I know this question must get asked a lot, but I wasn't able to turn up many good answers (and the answer I'm looking for is largely an opinion, anyhow). I've just (re)installed Woody on my laptop for about the third time. The first time I mucked things up severely with Partition Magic, and the second time I tried to change all of my apt sources to testing and do an upgrade, which destroyed a lot of perfectly good settings... My question is whether there is a "safe" (I mean *relatively* safe) way to move from stable to testing without serious damage, or if I'm better off formatting and installing from the Sarge netinst CD? I don't want the hassle of running a hybrid Woody/Sarge system, just because I'm too lazy to deal with the depedencies, but I don't mind a few bugs in exchange for a more recent version of KDE/gAIM/whatever. Any suggestions or past experiences would be most illuminating. Thanks, -- Aaron Bieber - Graphic Design // Web Design http://www.fisheyemultimedia.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
