Ok, so far I'm seeing the famed apt-get as little more than a gimmick. This is what I did.. and yeah, I'm a newbie but so what.. if anything that makes this more valid rather than less so. Supposedly slackware (according to some) is harder to work with than debian. All I have to say is "yeah right" (with extreme sarcasm).

Anyway, first I install 2.2 not knowing what I'm doing (cause yeah I didn't read where it says if you want newer hardware support press f3).. so the next time I go along and say hey.. I'll install 2.4 but before I do that I'm going to backup everything (the new kde xfree, etc.) into a folder i share between linux versions.

So this time in the installer I'm saying.. why install xserver and such when I'm going to put the new ones on out of that folder? I don't install them and then I copy the stuff over into the default /var/cache/apt/packages (or whatever.. something like this).. directory. I use apt-get and guess what? Nothing will install (yes I edited it to also draw from the testing tree). It will install a few things but only those which I previously had. And no I wasn't using upgrade I was using install. I typed apt-get install XFree (which had worked before with the upgrade keyword).. and such. Nothing. So I'm like.. why not use dpkg directly in the folder to install. So I go to the cache folder and type dpkg -i * and guess what? Of course it installs stuff but there are so many errors it stops (and there is seemingly no way to continue).. and now I can't use any utilities as they don't have the dependencies. Anyway.. I'll try something else based on debian but I'm really considering upgrading from woody a very silly prospect now with how messy this apt-get thing is.

I'm sure I did a few things wrong (or all of them) so feel free to offer corrections or whatever.. but I think at this point I have to say.. all things considered (even without my radeon drivers working).. slack is still the best all around distro..

I think you'll find this document very helpful:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/re...system.en.html

You probably got the error "E: Couldn't find package XFree"

The reason did not work is because that is not the package name. The package is called xserver-xfree86. So use If you know what the package is, but don't know the package name, you could type which will give you a listing of all packages containing xfree. The list can get quit long depending on the search phrase so you may want to pipe it to less or narrow the results with grep. You could also try aptitude or synaptic to install software packages.

Before making such claims, why not readup on how it actually works.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/

Installing xserver-xfree86 with all the recommended packages might work, but for a Debian beginner I'd recommend instead to install a meta-package called "x-window-system" (or its slimmer version "x-window-system-core") because it installs practically all the stuff from the XFree86-project plus some other related goodies.

Well.. I don't know much about how it actually works that's true.. but I'm looking at this from the perspective of having used swaret.. where you can almost always use a shorter version than the actual package name to update or install.

Actually that's the case with this also with some things but not with all.. and I hate having to type long names when commonly packages will be named like blah-blah_1-i386 I mean how am I supposed to just "know" that?

Also, when like I typed apt-get dist-upgrade it didn't upgrade kde.. I had to type apt-get install kde after because apparently it had removed it (startkde was not to be found)..

Anyway.. probably had something to do with the configuration files but I set in the installation routine for that to be installed I'd think the conf file would know..

*shrug*.. I'll look back at debian again later but right now I'm pretty happy with slackware and it's package management.

I came from Slack to Debian. It has been a rough road, but well worth it. I found Slack a little hard to keep up to date, and its native package listings smaller than my liking. Otherwise I still really like Slack.

Debian is hard to learn because it has all these cryptic commands and procedures to go about doing things instead of simply "cutting to the chase" as with Slack, but the result is that Debian knows it's own state at any given time. By issuing simple "apt-get upgrade"s you can get things upgraded very automatically and correctly with minimal extra tweaking. This includes all the menu systems in all your window managers! All the dependencies get correctly handled (upgraded/installed) as well.

Finally I love the over 14,000 packages listed in sid. No more messing around getting non-native software working in Slackware.

Compared to [binary] package managers in other Linux distributions, apt-get is not "messy". It is the most refined package manager available to Linux today. (that said, I haven't tried Mandrakes 'upri' yet, I still have a grudge against RPM based distros, maybe things are a lot better now). Be sure to check out the "synaptic" graphical front end to "apt".

Synaptic rocks no doubt. My problem is with the errors in preload scripts that happen with dpkg and such. If you try to upgrade from woody to sarge right now you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. There are several errors along the way that are a pain to work through if you don't know what you are doing.

But I'm fine now.. for the most part. going to post a new thread on a problem I'm having now but it's completely not related to this. I'm pretty happy with apt-get now after having worked with it more. Swaret I don't think is bad at all. And as far as the basic upgrade process from 9.1 to current it's easier usually than this I think, but anyway.. it's ok.. I have everything working now.

Slackware has an extremely simple package management system (some people may even say that Slackware has NO package management system) while Debian has a very complicated package management system, called APT (Advanced Package Tool). For one thing, Debian has considerably more packages available than Slackware. Debian also has three branches (stable, testing, and unstable) that contain different versions of software with different dependencies. APT even includes a technique called "apt-pinning" for mixing software from different branches.

Swaret is a simple tool for managing simple tasks while apt-get is a complicated tool for managing very complicated tasks. For an inept beginner it's easier to break a Debian system with apt-get than it is to break a Slackware system with Swaret but, in my humble opinion, this is only because apt-get gives users much more power than Swaret.

I haven't yet discussed DebConf, which makes a Debian system feel much more integrated than a Slackware system, or that Debian has been ported into many processor architectures that Slackware doesn't support but these features also have their impact on package management system. Of course, in the end it's a matter of personal preference whether you like Slackware or Debian better (IMO, both are fine distros), but you really shouldn't say that Swaret is better than apt-get until you have actually learned how to use apt-get.

BTW, I succeeded in breaking my Slackware system when trying to upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1 with Swaret. But I suspect that had much to do with my own ineptness. Debian and apt-get (or Aptitude) have worked for me without any major glitches so far. I might give Slackware another chance some day, but I may already be too spoiled by the luxury of apt-get and Debian's large software repositories to ever really appreciate downloading packages manually from linuxpackages.net and searching missing libraries and installing tarballs with configure-make-make checkinstall.

well it's not that difficult and in some cases you are better off making it yourself. For example I don't think the mplayer you can apt-get in debian is going to include support for wmv out of the box. But if you compile it yourself it's no problem to have those things. It does take longer to install (15 minutes or so on my system).

Besides, slack is partially about that exact experience that some people don't like. I think it's one of the good things about slack that it has a minimalistic system of package management. Now that isn't to say there aren't things that should be improved in that area, but if they can be improved in less complex ways I'd agree with that tendency as far as slack goes. Anyhow.. I do think both distributions serve their niche very well and I've changed my mind from my initial experiences with debian.

I still consider myself a Debian and also experienced various problems when trying to upgrade my Debian. The good news is that I've always managed to get the problems fixed and the resulting system is usually more stable (less broken apps) than before. Contrasted with my Slackware system where after attempting major upgrades with it, the more things break, and further updates just make things worse.

One thing that seems to help me with Debian updates is to update one major component at a time, such as Xfree86, KDE, glibc, etc. To date, I've always had the most problems with KDE, but always eventually got things working by doing a few "force-things" operations.