[NBLUG/talk] Jumping in with debian..

[troy]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 10:45:41AM -0700, Mitch Patenaude wrote:
> On Monday, Sep 29, 2003, at 14:21 US/Pacific, troy wrote:
> >On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 12:04:43PM -0700, Mitch Patenaude wrote:
> >>As a longtime Mandrake and Redhat user, I've decided to make the jump
> >>into Debian with my new laptop install.  I've got jigdo and am
> >>downloading the iso's right now.  Does anybody know of any guides for
> >>those new to Debian?
> >
> >Although it's too late for you, I'll second Jeremy's reco. to forgo
> >ISO's and do a network install.  All my Debian installs, woody, sid,
> >whatever began from the same 3.0r1 mini install disk.
> 
> Well... After trying with the woody install and then changing 
> sources.list to point to "testing", I tried to upgrade to the 2.4.22 
> kernel, and rendered the system unbootable.... so I tried the net 
> install for sarge, and that didn't even boot properly from the CD.  Is 
> it worth trying a potato net install?

The net installer for sarge is still very much a work in progress.  Just
get a bare woody system up and apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.

unordered ideas:
Was it just the kernel upgrade that went awry?  Any hints as to why?
I would upgrade the rest of the system first, and the kernel last.
Did you do a 'apt-get dist-upgrade'?  It's different from 'apt-get upgrade'.

IMHO, Sarge is often the worst series to use mainly because security
updates hit testing (sarge) only after they've been proven through
unstable(sid) first.  And things still break occasionally.  You get a lot
of the pain of unstable without the fun from Sid's bleeding edge
packages.  But Sid has been a real pain in the ass recently.

To get used to Debian, you might try running straight woody and grab
some of the backports from apt-get.org.  One doesn't get how stable
"stable" is until you've had a straight woody system sitting in the
corner doing its job for months on end with little maintenance.  Not to
mention the consistency and sanity with which the system is put
together.

> I'm tempted to go with Mandrake or RedHat.

You're not a quitter are ya? :-) :-)

Except on an idealogical level, I don't think it makes as much
difference as it used to.  You have apt for redhat now, and
freshrpms.net.

It's just so cool to hear about some interesting new package, do an
"aptitude install newpackage" and have it install in seconds.  Chances
are some Debian developer has already packaged it up.

-troy