I have been using RedHat since RedHat 7.0 and always used it with full satisfaction until the fedora core project kicked in so i am going away from redhat and (learn) a new distro.

My choise is Debian

I have only some minor questions

1 Which commando shows me the packages installed on my system.
2 How to keep up2date with security issues (it asks me at install if i would like to install the packages from security.debian ) but how to do that after security holes kicks in.
3 I now install packages with apt_get install <packagename> is this correct?
4 How long are security updates availeble for a debian distro?

Thanks for your time.

1 dpkg -l (that's a small L)
2 - add deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list
- run apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
3 nope, it's apt-get
4 the security team supports this stable and the last one. (and naturally the testing & unstable too)
So now they support potato and woody, but if sarge becomes stable, the support
for potato gets dropped and they'll support woody and sarge.

Excellent choice.
Once you answer "yes" to that question, the following line gets added to /etc/apt/sources.list automatically:

deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free


You don't need to do anything further to keep up to date apart from apt-get update; apt-get upgrade as mentioned by iceman. Or, use the dselect application to manage updates - it's menu driven, and works very well. If you like GUI apps and you're comfortable with the way the RH package manager works, you can use the Synaptic package manager from within your favourite desktop environment.


For added security updates you can manually add the following line to sources.list:

deb http://security.debian.org testing/updates main contrib non-free


...to get some security updates from the testing branch. These aren't as timely as the stable ones, though, but in my opinion the more feelers you have out for security updates, the better

Thanks for your answers

I have absolutly no regrets i did choose debian.
apt-get install <package> i love it, no more i need this and that and whatevermore, it all just works.
exept my intel eepro100 module but that is a kernel 2.4.18 issue i guess and some acpi things because a cat /proc/pci tells me the intel card is at irq 20 and so the module can not autoprobe.

But i am compiling the 2.4.23 kernel the debian way so that will work when i am done compiling. (i hope but i have good hope)

Marvelous, why the hell did i choose
RedHat in the first place.