Hi, guys. I have tried many other distros to find the one that best suits me. But how can I make a choice without a try on the popular Debian? So I am thinking of installing debian and giv it a try.

Now the problem is, I know there are 3 branches of Debian which are Sid, Sarge and Woody. And I heard that Sarge is taking over Woody this month. So is this the right time for me to install Woody first, then upgrade it to Sarge later, or should I wait until Sarge is officially announced as stable and then install it straight away?

I am going to use my box as a desktop workstation but not a server, so I would like to have newer softwares available. Please tell me what you think.

Thanks.

hi

Sarge doesn't have official security support yet, so it is lacking in that area. Otherwise, it's very stable already. Woody is too old to be used for desktops. If you are running a non-mission-critical desktop then you could even think about running unstable, it isn't really that unstable (packages/dependencies are just broken sometimes etc - although of course it can in theory break someday). Unstable aka sid isn't supported by the Debian security team either, but since packages are updated very often it is more secure (but buggier) than testing afaik. Unstable has kde 3.3/gnome 2.6/kernel 2.6.8 at the moment. Testing has kde 3.2/gnome 2.6/2.6.7 kernel.

I'd suggest using the new debian-installer to install debian. It's very good: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I think most Debian people just download whatever is available and adjust their apt-get to point to testing or unstable, then do a dist-upgrade.

So I think I should install Sarge right now with the Sarge Installation CD.

Thanks, guys.
I hope Debian can be my final destination

IIRC, the security updates for Sarge began 2 weeks ago.

Install Sarge now, change the name 'testing' to 'sarge' in the /etc/apt/sources.list, this way when Sarge becomes 'stable' you don't have to change anything.

As far as I know the security support was supposed to start 2 weeks ago but hasn't started yet, I'm not sure though.