I noticed a strange thing today, not sure how to explain it exactly. So this might be a little less coherent.

I use Debian on my desktop and on my laptop. Both point to "testing" repositories. Both point to the same mirrors.

But today, when I did a dist-upgrade on my laptop, it asked me to install 2.6.18 kernel and I did. On my desktop system this package doesn't even appear after doing an "apt-get update". On both I use the meta-package for linux-image-2.6

Also I notice subtle differences in Synaptic Package Manager between the two machines. On my older (desktop) Synaptic asks me whether I want to do a "Smart Upgrade" or not when upgrading, but on my laptop Synaptic doesn't ask me anything of this kind. And even the visual appearance of the "updating" dialog is different and yet both Synaptic installations have the same version number (0.57.8).

This is peculiar, because I expected that when I use testing (both x86 versions, not any other arch), I thought that the systems will be pretty similar.

In the desktop system Debian was installed when Sarge was still in "testing" and has been updated since then.

In the laptop system Debian was installed more recently from "etch" snapshots.

I'm wondering why there should be these differences between the two Debian systems. Both point to "testing", but I cannot help but notice subtle differences between the two, particularly when Synaptic is running and the way dist-upgrade works.

I keep a small (1GB) etch install for backup/emergency/utility purposes, and it also didn't install the 2.6.18 kernel, though my main etch install did. Not sure why yet. In fact, this install has had a couple of unique problems, perhaps due to the timing of the updates.

Another factor in the minor differences would of course be variance in installed packages and their consequent dependencies. Side effects from this might not be explicable at a casual glance.

But I can't claim to know anything very definite about this

I'm not sure, but how do I account for the differences in Synaptic package manager?

you could export the installed package lists from both systems and compare them..

On the first system
dpkg --get-selections > system1.txt

On the Second system
dpkg --get-selections > system2.txt

Copy one of the output files to the other machine and compare them..
diff system1.txt system2.txt

Might turn out rather interesting..

Thanks for the tip farslayer. Even I felt that on my laptop system, the whole installation seemed cleaner. Having done a lot of "apt-get dist-upgrades" from pre-stable sarge on my desktop system, I seem to have a lot of old/obsolete packages still littered around.

Ok. Now I see that the two "synaptic" installations behaved differently because (duh) they had different settings in the "Preferences" box. Sorry about that.

As for not getting the latest updates on my desktop, maybe the mirror I use to update my desktop hadn't got the changes from the master server and the other mirror updated faster.

I've been running a sid system for quite a while now ands loving it.. I finally took an old box and installed Etch and there are definitely some differences in the default install. Etch has a number of goodies that are not on my sid box..

I need to do the same thing so I can add some of that etch goodness to my sid box. the graphical update notifier and graphical updater are kinda neat.. although I;ve always done that from the command line before. If I poke around I'm sure I'll find quite a few other things as well.