ive looked around for a list of which repos i should have enabled and installed, but i cont find a recent on. I am running a stable etch system. If someone think i sould switch to testing id be ok with that, but i currently have a stable (as i said). Im not sure what repos to have installed.

thanks for any help you can provide hope you can understand my incoherent ranting.

Can you post your /etc/apt/sources.list?

Also, the repos you add depend on what exactly you want to do with your system, where you reside in the world, and what package that you want is missing.

Typically on my stable boxes, I'll just keep the Debian standard repos unless something is missing that I want on that box. For example, one of my stable boxes runs MythTV, which required me to add Debian Multimedia...

this is what i have, but i just want to make sure my options are open and i can take full advantage of my system

also would you recommend running a testing system as compared with a stable sys?

thanks!

I typically just run stable because my wife gets annoyed when an update messes something up. But many people are perfectly happy running testing.

You could make the first couple lines "main contrib non-free" to include some of the other official packages. I believe contrib means the package relies on something non-free (as in freedom) and non-free means that they're closed source (like nvidia drivers).

Also you could add debian multimedia or any other number of things. Here's a link to the sources.list megathread. The first one was updated after Etch was released, but some of the other posts will be dated. Again, you don't need all these sources, it sort of depends on what package you want and if it's not in the official repos. And I would stay away from mixing sources, i.e. having stable (etch), testing (lenny), unstable (sid), and/or experimental all in the same sources.list. That's just asking for trouble. Only really experienced users should mess with mixed repositories, and I'm not one of them. :P

thank you a bunch!