I just thought it would be fun and maybe even informative to see which debian version you use what you think of it, and if you want to upgrade, stay put, or have tried another version and prefer the one you have.

I was running Woody a great ver but I decided to upgrade to testing/sarge, I love it despite a few problems namely that I can't set the background in KDE, but wonderful otherwise, my sound is even working despite being unable to get it working in Woody. but anyways what do you all think?

--Alex

Three things:
1) It's "Hamm" and not "Ham"
2) "Slink" was the version before "Potato"
3) I use two different versions on my different computers. My server runs woody because it's rock-solid stable and doesn't need flashy new stuff. My desktop and laptop run sid because .. well, flashy new stuff is fun

yea sorry about that I missed a couple I was going stictly from memory. --Alex

I find I prefer stable and do not like to upgrade the entire OS a lot.
So I prefer Woody and am not sure that people that think that Woody's software is "too old" know what they are talking about. There are other versions of Debian to fit any taste.

when u install debian using stable iso cds

and then when u want to get the latest of gnome, mozilla, multi-media apps .. how do u do it?

at the promt if u do

#apt-get upgrade gnome
#apt-get upgrade mozilla

etc etc

will it automatically upgrade to gnome 2.4, mozilla 1.5? etc etc ...............

or one will have to install debian from scratch using testing or unstable iso cds ?

hasan:

Debian has three branches (well, three main ones):
stable
testing
unstable

Stick with stable if you want something that is virtually crashproof and has all the software versions you want.

Testing ... well, don't use testing. It's basically a staging area for the next stable release.

Unstable is for those who are willing to put up with the occasional breakage in order for newer software. It's still very stable (in spite of its name) and very secure and reliable, but it's not going to upgrade without problem every time. You'll have to learn about Debian in order to use this without problems, basically.

So, you have your choice. GNOME 2.4 and Mozilla 1.5 are only in unstable (actually, I think Moz 1.5 just went into testing too).

how does multi-media apps fare under debian (stable, unstable) ?

somehow after agonizing long hours i was able to install debian stable few months back

but it did not detect my 16MB ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra GL AGP

so i had to use VESA driver with crapy resolution


it also did not detect my sound chip.

~~~~~~~~~

rite now i am using Fedora Core 1

its detects video card, it detects on board Viatech soundmax AC'97 chip.

i can also use my Canon digital camera S400 with it.

gphoto reads my camera i can download pics from it to the computer .....

i was able to get mp3 plugin for it

i also installed xine and able to watch dvds etc

it never crashed on me

everything was a breeze

i have even installed slackware 9.1

that too was awesome ........ without any hardships .... despite its impression of being not so user friendly

~~~~~~~~~~~

i dont run servers

but i plan to

not for running mission critical stuff ............ but to practise installing and administering servers .......

will i be able to do all of these things???

specially playing mp3s, watching DVDs and accessesing digital cameras

and where can i find the source to download and burn iso's for debian UNstable ...

or even if i use debian STABLE can still play mp3s, dvds and access digital cameras?

well to answer question one about upgrading Mozilla and Gnome, you can add a source to your /etc/apt/sources.list that includes the testing distro then run apt-get etc....after you upgrade what you want then you just comment out the testing source. 1 note before you run apt-get upgrade, run apt-get update, and I would recommend you only get what you want ie, apt-get Mozilla, or apt-get Gnome. if I may go a bit further I would even suggest using dselect or aptitude to select the packages that you want to install. but if you do that you may run into dependancy problems, an example is that testing distro uses some new libraries and updated ones that stable doesn't. your other options include checking out some of the sites that have backports, those are sites that have ported some software from the testing distro to be run on the stable. Also you can check out the GNOME site, and mozilla web site, they may have .deb packages that you can use. an example is that KDE website has packages of the new KDE that you can use. Finally of course you always have "make".

Now to address multimedia. Debian's biggest trouble is that through the current distro it has not had any autodetection to speak of. THe new testing distro does nad it works quite well. If you'd like to use the stable distro though, there is a utility called discover, that will autodetect for you, it recognized all my newer hardware, so I don't see why it shouldn't recognize hardware that is slightly older. As for running multimedia apps. Debian does have many aps with their disto that handles multiple multimedia formats. XMMS is a standard installed application that can play MP3's as well as MPEG video, provided you have the proper libs installed. and I am not sure what apps they have for DVD viewing I have not gotten that far as of yet with my setup. However, in general Linux has been lagging behind slightly, though regardless of what comes with debians main distro, there are many sites which have .deb packages with software that does not come with the main distro, and there is also a nice utility called alien that will let you install rpm packages, so for instance let's say fedora has a wonderful DVD player you like you can find the package at someplace like rpmfind.net download it and install it. if you run into an issue like a library that it need you don't have you can find it, or find the source for the DVD player and compile it yourself. I recently had to do this myself with some apps and it wasn't as hard as I thought it was.

Good luck to both of you

--Alex

I'm still using Potato (2.2r4), which was my first ever encounter with Linux. After trying it on a second machine since Jan 02, it has been my sole OS since Aug 03.

I got the CDs for Woody, but they wouldn't work in my CD-R, although it works for everything else & still reads the Potato CDs just fine. CheepLinux.com were baffled & sent me another set of Woody CDs, but still no joy.

So basically, I would like to upgrade, but it looks like I'm going have to do it over the web (an overnight job with a dial-up connection).

Having said all that, I love Potato - especially good with Icewm.

Gavin.

I have woody on an old crappy pc. I'm working on adding it as a dual boot to my main pc right now which has win98... then I can really have some fun with it. Maybe after a few months I will try out the unstable version and just tweak around any glitches.

I must say one thing about linux. It's got the best support of anything computer related. . All be damned, it's free too... Cept for those screwy red hat peeps, what's up with them?

I use Woody on my work machine, because its a crap-o-la 366 AMD box and woody makes it run pretty smooth (only a few hiccups with the mouse and soundcard - mostly due to my inexperience. I use Mandrake at home, so hand-editing config files is not my forte

I tried apt-get updating to Sarge but could never get it to work. I would enter broken dependency hell every time, so I just gave up. I'm content to run Woody - never once had a crash or freeze, which I can't say about Mandrake 9.1 (occasionally suffers random X crashes).

I'm running woody with sarge package, sorta. . A friend of mine said he use to install the woody releas, then just change the sources to sarge when installing packages, so thats the way I run it right now. I havent really had any serious crashes or hangups, even though I have installed and removed a whole lot of packages.
..what does the distupgrade really do?

I installed Woody bf2.4. After the installation I did some apt-pinning by creating a preferences file that prioritized testing over stable. I also created an apt.conf file to circumvent the "E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room" error. After this, I added new testing sources in sources.list, ran apt-get update, and then apt-get upgrade to upgrade the kernel to Sarge (as far as I can tell). Worked like a dream. Next came apt-get install discover mdetect hotplug xutils. Next apt-get install x-window-system-core. And then the KDE packages. Not all of the KDE packages will install in this configuration because of unmet dependencies, nothing that I can't live without however.

Try these URLs for more thorough information:

Apt-Pinning for Beginners: http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html

Installing Debian/KDE (information here is inacurate but not too hard to figure out):
http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebianKDE

yes I noticed that the sarge distro has dependancy probs with kde, but I also noted that if you add the kde apt server, it still doesn't download the dependancy that kde has on their servers it's strange

I use the unstable branch, and i can honestly say that i have never had any problems with, aside from the odd broken package. Gnome and KDE are the worst offenders

The thing that turned me off from debian a few years ago was woody, for me (imho) it was ugly, my network card did not work, no matter what i did. but a year later i tried the testing branch and everything worked perfectly. altho not bleeding edge. and then a year ago, i made the jump to unstable and have never looked back.

My system never crashes, locks up or anything, so even tho it is unstable, its a million times more stable the windows ever wants to be.

the only problem i have at the moment is getting usb support in debian. if anyone out there knows how i can get it without recompiling my kenel i would like to hear from you

Londonboi