I'm wondering... running Sid currently and things aren't exactly.. hmm.. silky smooth. Yes, I knew going in what unstable meant, and I can handle it, I'm just really not in the mood to at the moment (though as it is it generally behaves better than some other distros I've used). Right now I'm wondering if I remove all my unstable repositories, and just give it testing again, if it will migrate itself back to testing in a reasonable amount of time. I've read in different places that files go from Sid to Sarge in aprox 10 days. Is this correct or have I just been reading uninformed posts? If this is so, then would it be logical to assume that in less than 2 wks I will have a system that is once again fully on the testing branch? I'm kinda lost on the way the dev structure works here, as I've never been with Debian through a release change.

Sid is good, but just a bit too edgy for me right now, Firefox mainly is acting the fool right now (locking up on occasion), but a couple other little niggles are starting to grate on my nerves. Nothing major, really, minor glitches (Gnome splash screen won't go away unless I click on it, Rythmbox is pretty unusable if I'm doing anything else on the system, stutters and chokes when surfing or clicking on anything.. that's probably the worst one), but I guess I'm just hormonal right now . As it is I'm torn between taking this to testing, or moving to Ubuntu.

hehe, no, you debian unstable install won't magically become testing in 2 weeks.

You will need to pin in order to do a mass downgrade. Change your sources in /etc/apt/sources.list from unstable to testing (just replace every instance of unstable or sid with testing), then create the file /etc/apt/preferences and copy/paste the following:

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 550

then apt-get update then apt-get dist-upgrade.

Now read carefully want apt tells you. Remember the debian warranty, if you break it, you get to keep all pieces

Yanik

Ok cool. Pinning is one of the magical things I've not learned yet . Last night I was reading about what I needed to do and saw what you suggest, but was looking for a preferences file to put the info in. So I have to create it, that's the part of the puzzle I was missing. Is the exact name of the file just "preferences"?

Not overly concerned with borking the system, though would like to avoid it if I can. If it happens, it happens. Nothing lost, and experience gained .

\edit\
Ok, disregard my question about the file name, I was running out for a bit then but I've looked it up. Thanks again for the pointers, going to tweak now ...