Hi all,

I have been a Debian stable (woody then sarge) user for a couple of years at work. I have now also switched my home laptop to Debian testing (etch), mostly in order to get more of the cooler software.

So I have been pretty happy with the testing thing, having a lot more cool stuff work right out of the box. [Well at least linux style ;-)] Unfortunately I have had a crash during the update of kde 3.3 to 3.4 (this was like 3-4 weeks ago) and had to reinstall all my root partition.

I seem to have been unlucky and strike right at the time of some major transition for the etch developpers... For me as a user it sucks as I discovered that k3b, amarok, mplayer and other goodies were unavailable (and ironically available on stable/sarge...)

So here are my questions:

1. Timing: I have searched quite a bit on the web these days. I have seen relatively old emails (approx Aug 2005?) already mentioning some "c++ abi transition". If this is the source of most of my current problems, how long may such a transition last?
   
2. Information: I accept the move is certainly very important, however I must regret the lack of information around this, at least for a "newbie." Where can I be informed about such transitions and the corresponding timings, estimated time to arrivals, etc... Something like 'aptitude update && aptitude repos-info' would be cool... ;-) Could even think of some kind of leveling (newbie/normal/expert) of the info (just as dpkg-reconfigure does), in order to deliver understandable information.
   
3. Videoplayer: Ok so since the standard debian and the marillat repositories seem somewhat limited during the transition, is there any movie player out there which I can easily install? (mplayer, vlc, kaffeine seem not to be out there for the time being and ffmpeg seems not to play subtitles...)

Some people could probably tell me I could install from source. Well, I have tried but am apparently still too much of a loser to do this alone (at least tried with mplayer, and got a complaint because of my gcc version).

Thanks for any hints, especially regarding the first question ;-)
Philippe

Testing seems to be in a generally flaky shape at the moment being due to various transitions and large things outright missing due to that. Unstable is working quite well though. I can't think of anything that I am currently missing from there.

Testing will be eventually get back to its normal self, but I have no clue how long that'll take. It is quite a puzzle picking things from unstable at an uneven rate and trying to get them to cooperate with existing things in testing - that's why things eventually break when the mix gets too heterogenous. But it'll settle down eventually...

As for video player try totem,gxine or xine. If u can't wait for k3b grab it from sid. It should be in etch by now tho'. In synaptic u can search for ur pkg after reload or apt-get update.