Right, that's it, I've had it with Debian.

The last four or five upgrades I've done have crippled my machine. Does nobody test the bloody packages before they're released. I now have no synaptic and no kmail, yesterday I had no k3b, they won't install because they have dependecies on packages that are not even available on experimental.

I have been a Debian user for 3 years and used to recommend it to everyone but I spend more time fixing it than using now. It is ridiculous.

I've heard that the top Debian packagers have been poached by Ubuntu so I'm going to follow them.

Bye

i hear you !

i have exactly the same problems. but i have already seen ubuntu so i guess i will stick with debian just a little longer.
the dependency problems messed up my system which was configured to unstable. what did you use (stable/testing/unstable) ?

can you post your sources.list ? mine is in another thread (sources.list question).

its called testing/unstable for a reason maybee??

I knew there were all kinds of dep problems with KDE, but I decided it would be worth a shot to test it out.

I loved it - the new KDE 3.4 is awsome... But it all started when I realized my K3B wasn't in the testing distro because it can't make it out of unstable for dep issues.

I installed it from unstable to burn a LFS Live CD.

I restarted lastnight to do some work in LFS on a new hd. Then when I was finished and ready for bed I rebooted to get back to Debian. I got the shell. KDm would not start. GDM either. I plkayed with the X settings. Xserver was not recognizing my /dev/psaux device (my mouse). So it never started up.

Thats when I remembered from the night before. I could not view my 'devices' in Konqueror. It said something along the lines of 'devices not a recognoized protocol' or 'no devices found' or some crap - its a blur in my mind, but it never showed my devices. I have to manually mount my devices in the shell then open them in Konquer go to my mount dir. Pain in the arse.

Anyways. I decided I would backup all my crap to my server and reinstall Debian Etch. I figured it was a problem with my dist-upgrade I did and maybe it would work with a fresh clean install. Turns out I dont have the room to backup much. SO I said f*** it and reformatted without backing up.

I still haven't finished the reinstall - i am still having dep issues with certain packages and its becoming a pain to even install this. I may reformat and go back to Sarge today...

Hi doctorwebbox, feel free to rant all you want if it will help you.

So the last 4-5 upgrades of stable have messed your machine up, eh?

BillyGalbreath, have you considered multi-booting parallel versions of Debian? You could consider running stable by itself and testing/unstable/mixamania to your heart's content on another corner of the disk. Storage is cheap nowadays.

You know... That's actually a pretty darn good idea. I already have a setup for Debian/LFS.. Since my machine is down at the moment anyways, I guess I could setup Debian Stable/Debian Testing/LFS.

A few questions though. I've always had a diff hd for each distro installed, thus a root partition and swap partition on each drive. Now I only have two hds, so I am going to put the two Debians on the big one (200gb). It just seems like a waste of space to have 2 partitions on this one drive for swap. Can I have only 1 partition for swap and have both Debians use it?

Example:
hda (200gb)
---hda1 swap 1gb
---hda2 ext3 50gb
---hda3 ext3 50gb
---hda4 ext3 100gb
hdb (8gb)
---hdb1 swap 512mb
---hdb2 ext3 7.5gb

hda1 would be swap for both Debians.
hda2 would be Debian Sarge.
hda3 would be Debian Etch
hda4 would be the /home directory for Debian Sarge ONLY. I will have Etch's /home on the root partition. Etch will also mount this drive to store/retrieve my files, but not as /home to prevent conficts.
hdb1 would be swap for LFS - unless I can have LFS use hda1 as swap also.
hdb2 would be LFS

Can my LFS use the swap from hda? That would save me some space on this drive for LFS. It's only an 8gb hd.

I already know how to setup GRUB for this setup, I am just mainly worried about running into mixing problems between the two Debians.

Does this partition table look decent to you? How would you improve upon it?

I WAS running stable originally but had to burn a CD right away when I found k3b was missing. The only way I could get it then and there was to get it from an unstable source.

Stable should have had a working K3B. I know, I was stable not more than 3 days ago. It wasn't until I upgraded to testing that my K3B was missing...

Hi BillyGalbreath

You said:
"It just seems like a waste of space to have 2 partitions on this one drive for swap. Can I have only 1 partition for swap and have both Debians use it?"

Well, if you were an even greater magician as David Copperfield or Houdini, I suppose you could be able to run at the _same_ time on the _same_ machine 2 different OS'ses in parallel. NO, not the method of VMWare, where one OS is running under the umbrella of another!
So there's no problem at all to have both Debians use the same swap-partition, when Deb1 is using it, Deb2 is soundly asleep and vice versa.

Good luck.

Hello people,

Stable has working programs, but kind of old if you're looking for... what are you looking for anyway?

Start using aptitude instead "apt-get install". It will show what packages will be removed (even if you don't want them to be removed), what will be updated, etc. You can than make a better decision of what you really want. Especially if you're running Debian testing/unstable. If you'll get the grip of it you'll fix some of the dependencies problems faster (I mean when being in testing/unstable and want to install programs that are not instalable without breaking other stuff you need).

K3b disappered in testing/unstable because it depended on a particular version of one of the libraries, but that version probably couldn't be found. The C++ ABI transition is still in place, and that is causing lots of problems.

BillyGalbreath: you can use the same swap for the two debian installations. Using the same partition for /home it is indeed not a good idea because you'll have different config files. You could also use the same /tmp, if needed.

...

There should be a sticky warning of dist-upgradeing unstable systems until this process is over.It
should be a few weeks worth of no upgrades and all should be fine.Give them a break,there makeing debian better for us all.

I ain't giving them no break. Work, work work. )
I just said what is going on. I ain't complaining. A man's got to do, what a man's got to do. (or a woman)

Sorry,I should have seperated the sentances.
That comment was kind of just a blab for everyone,not towards you in general.

what about compiling k3b?
i'm doing that now.

What surprises me is that watching dvd's fails now - this worked out of the box a year ago.
Debian should freeze the public archives in a usable state when they have such problems.