switching to debian??
 

i'm seeing the evil of rpm based distros, they're such a pain to update, i'm currently caught in a dependancy hell.

debian is good, but the fact that it's so outdated makes installing even mroe difficult.

i'd like to install woody, then set apt sources to unstable so i can get all the altest packages. i'm wondering couple of things:

A: what size will this be?
B: is it possible to get this in an iso? so that using my 26.4k home connection becomes unnesessary to do the initial update

thanks for your time. :scratch:

:) hi i tried to update my woody to testing (before unstable) i told me that it want's to dload 350mb of files :) and because my connection is 56k and i'm using dialup so i decided to stay with stable :)

http://debian.abexia.com/sid.html

...though it's i386-only.

But that's probably so ridiculously out of date that you'll be downloading a couple hundred meg of files to update it anyway. Unfortunately for 56k'ers (and I feel your pain), the best way I've found to install Sid is to use the net-install CD. It takes a good few hours to download and install (especially if you start adding stuff like X and GNOME to the base install) but you're guaranteed to get as close to the latest packages as possible (although I'd still recommend a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade afterward to make sure).

I have a 56k connection. I just set it going overnight and in the morning have an updated system. My ISP also has a 4 hour limit so I've set it to persist in my pppd setup. Sometimes some packages will not be downloaded due to time-out but most will so I just retype the last apt-get command and it gets the missing packages (it wont set any of them up until you get a fully successful run). A little time consuming but once you've upgraded you only need to to small upgrades every once in a while. It's better to go do something else while this happens, though.

yip i'll try :) because debian supports partly dloads so it's goin' to be a dist-upgrade next week :)

thanks guys, i'll work on it.

If you have slow connection or small hard drive - this might be a useful way to upgrade:

http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?dis...SmallHardrives

It basically updates a few packages at a time (you control it through editing the update.packages file).

If you have any problems or suggestions, please leave info on that page below the initial posting.

How does this CD work? What packages does it contain?

I have a weird situation. My ADSL modem is not supported by Linux. SO I have to download from Windows and then update my install of Woody. Woody is doing fine but i would like to update a few things.....

You can check packages at:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/

As for your modem situation - is there any way that you can set up a network. I use linux on my machine by having a router which connects to the modem, and runs dhcpd - my linux machine runs dhcp-client and get's an IP and I'm connected.

kabads: yeah, my borther has windows xp, and by acident he had dhcp setup so that when eth0 on my machine would ifup, his machine would dial-out, and i would have the network and the internet over a single gateway.

my isp cuts out at 12 hours. if i'm in the middle of downloading packageFoo-X.X.X.x.deb would i lose the portion already downloaded? or would my brothers machine just redial and apt-get would merrily keep on downloading the package from the point at which it was disconnected?

BTW- i would need some basic kde packages and some gnome packages, only for gnome/kde apps i'll be running. i use xfce4 as my de/wm, so no need to get lots of big kde/gnome packages. along with some devel packages so i can build gimp1.3, blender, among other apps.

thanks again, you guys rock :cool:

Apt-get may time out but if you start the download again it will pick up from where it left off. If wont do any setup of packages until you get a fully successful run.

You can also specify options as in the following to only download packages so that you can be in attendance to answer debconf questions when you actually install the packages:

When you want to install the packages, just run the upgrade command as usual.

Very useful, especially if you write your own scripts to do some of the more tedious chores of system administration, or if you use 'at' or 'cron' to schedule downloads at certain times. Useful because even though I'm on 56k too, more times than not I actually get all the updates in one go, so I need to script/schedule things to only download and then turn off the internet connection.