I am hoping to try out Sarge or Sid ISOs. I read that the Sarge ISO will not boot yet. What about SID? SID maybe too new and unreliable despite some good reviews in this forum.
How do I get a bootable Sarge/SID ISO - the first CD?

I have never heard of anyone having bootable sarge or sid cd's. I may be wrong but the best way to get them is with network install, after using a woody boot cd. If you don't know how to do this just reply and I can give instructions.
John Hornbeck

> I have never heard of anyone having bootable sarge or sid cd's.

These folks offer them:
http://debian.abexia.com/sarge.html
http://debian.abexia.com/sid.html

Unfortunately, they only seem to be available here for x86.
I bought my Woody (PPC and x86) CD's from them. They seem
to be a first-rate outfit.

Thanks, I did not know of them. I like to just create my own though.
John Hornbeck

The more I think about it, the more I think of sarge as less suitable for normal users than even sid, actually. I've begun to think of testing as more of a staging area for the next stable, which, while it does have the advantage of being newer than stable and more tested than unstable, is still subject to large changes which can unnerve the user. For example, back when Debian was transitioning from glibc 2.2 to 2.3, a few hundred packages that were otherwise ready to go into testing (except that it didn't have glibc 2.3 in there) all flooded in fairly quickly once the 2.3 transition did happen. For example, I think all of KDE 3.1 was included there.

So, if you want to go with sarge, go for it but be prepared for the occasional big day of downloading. If you are trepidacious about the occasional breakage that occurs in sid (which happens, but not that often and not that severe), then I might actually even suggest that you track a snapshot of sid that's X number of days/weeks old. I'll write up a HOWTO on how to do that in a bit and post it somewhere here for those who are curious.

Thanks for the analysis Strike.

I'd heard similar things elsewhere ( www.osnews.com maybe) about either going with Woody or Sid, but generally not Sarge (unless, of course, you're helping get the next Debian release ready :) .

Looking forward to your HowTo.

Thanks everyone. I think what we get with the Live CD distros like Knoppix, Morphix and Mepis is basically SID. Unfortunately they do not have notable software in the first CD itself as Woody does. The first CD of Woody has everything I want!! But none of the above do
I know we can apt-get from a Woody install -but this may not be possible sometimes. Some folks do not have high bandwidth, Other folk (like me) do not have a Linux driver for the USB ADSL modem!

So

If I download the first Sarge/SID CD ISO - can I apt-get from THIS?

Thinking on the lines of STRIKE - since we can apt-get what we want - simple upgrade CDs and NEW software CDS (not available in Woody) maybe the way to go until everyone has high bandwidth and all those lazy USB ADSL modem manufacturers make Linux drivers available for them!

BTW
You can get ISO images of Debian CDS from various mirrors
http://www.debian.org/distrib/cd

The SID ISO -1 that I downloaded is bootable! It installs too!
I am not sure how stable it is yet.

But it is sure to have less bugs than MSW

Heh, you know, I just realized that this:

is kind of dumb, actually. That snapshot will still contain the major snafus from X days ago. I may still write an article like this, though, but instead it'll be how to track snapshot.debian.net and how to revert to old versions of programs for when there is breakage in sid.