I'm new to debian and was planning to install etch on my PC. I'm curious to know if it would be easy to later upgrade to a stable version of etch once it gets released.

You won't have to upgrade to Etch-stable. Etch will eventually become the stable version and Sid will move from unstable to testing. Once Etch is officially released, you will have to change your sources.list entries from testing to stable to prevent moving to Sid (the new testing).

I hope that this clarifies.

@lilohatea

jarod, note that you can have either "stable" or "sarge" (or, "testing" or "etch") in your /etc/apt/sources.list.

sarge == "stable"
etch == "testing"

"stable" and "testing" are just symlinks to the the actual named distro versions.

If you have the named distro listed (like "etch"), then when etch becomes "stable", you still have etch. You just keep doing your apt-get update/upgrades as usual -- you just get fewer updates, since it's stabilized.

If you have the other name listed (like "testing"), then when etch becomes "stable", the next time you apt-get update/upgrade, you get... hm... well, you keep getting packages from "testing", but I think you have to do a dist-upgrade to completely make the upgrade to the new "testing"...

Any clarification on that from others is welcome and appreciated.

Oh, btw, nominally, I think it's considered an "upgrade" to go from stable to testing (or testing to unstable (or stable --> unstable)).

You can't go back down the other way though. Well, maybe you can if you wanted to take excruciating pains to do it, but it'd be much easier just to reinstall and start over.

Ok, thanks. Because I want to try the AMD64, which is only offered as etch.

It's also offered as SID and would probably be your best bet as new software comes out. I'm on AMD64 and running SID:
Linux version 2.6.15-1-amd64-k8 (Debian 2.6.15-3) (Debian 4.0.2-7)

Yeah I know that's not a debian kernel I'm running, but I wanted a new kernel and the only "released" debian kernels are 2.6.8-16 which obviously doesn't work with some of the newer stuff such as a pure udev system. Anyways if you'd like any help setting up an AMD system for SID (or sarge if you want stable/testing) I'd be willing to help, as I guess many of us are. =P

I do have a good repo for AMD64 unstable.

Sid will never be testing sid is always unstable, what will happen is that testing will get frozen and worked on for a while till its stable enough then cut away and released as stable, then testing is opened up again and the flow from unstable to testing is resumed.

Well I just installed Debian and I can't get Xfree86 to work. I have heard horror stories of people trying to configure it. It seems as though I too am stuck. I can't seem to get the nice desktop interface to work. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty comfortable with the commandline, but I do like browsing the web at the same time. any pointers on what I can do to fix this.

jarod_123 could you be a bit more descriptive about your problem and also posting your xfree86 error messages would be helpful to. You could try dpkg-reconfigure xfree86-xserver as a start point i suppose though.