----- res0u2uc(a)verizon.net wrote:
Problem is, if your sources.list point only to stable,
you
only get old stuff, and missing a lot of the latest, newest
stuff entirely. Add a couple lines and now you get newer
stuff, but then you need to upgrade C libraries.
I don't know how you do that in Debian. I've smashed my
system every time I tried, probably because the only way I
could see to do it was to use --force, which I did without
really understanding (or heeding the many warnings.)
It's called backporting. You add a deb-src line for sid in sources.list, apt-get
source <packagename>, apt-get build-dep <packagename>, enter the source
directory, dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot and theoretically you should have an updated
package for sarge. But the libc6 upgrade messed that up for some packages. I recently
backported jackd and libjack from sid but they won't install without removing /every
single/ package from sarge that depends on the old libjack. I'm assuming this is
because the newer libjack is not backwards compatible or the current sid package has some
broken dependencies.
With the etch installer I got a 2.6 kernel out of the
box.
Alsa is already in there.
Both of these are in the sarge installer. To install with 2.6, type linux26 at the d-i
boot prompt. To install alsa, install discover and alsa-base then run alsaconf.
That said, it is always a bit of a bear to
reconfigure.
I thought I would never need to do it again, but then I
pressed the wrong button, and for some reasons, my tar
backups didn't work quite right :-p
It took me a while to understand debconf and the way maintainers split packages. That said
reconfiguration is simple using Debian tools. It can get hairy if you are pulling packages
from all over the place. I think my sources.list file on my development box has about 20
lines!
-lee