25 Dec
2003
25 Dec
'03
7:43 a.m.
On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 07:56 pm, tim hall wrote:
On Thursday 25 December 2003 08:46, Erik Steffl
wrote:
Good advice. A full "unstable" system take quite a bit of
constant updating which would hurt on a 56k dialup connection
so a good compromise is to run mainly as a "testing" system
and only use "unstable" for the latest audio apps. I decided
to update my mothers "unstable" system last night, after about
3 months, and it took 248Mb of downloads to do so.
For anyone wondering how to... edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and add
APT::Default-Release "testing";
make sure you have testing AND unstable targetted in your
/etc/apt/sources.list, such as (pick a mirror nearer yourself)...
deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
and do an apt-get update then apt-get -t unstable whatever.
I use these aliases in my .bashrc for conveniance...
alias e='nano -w -t -x -c -R '
alias edapt='e /etc/apt/sources.list'
alias apt-update='apt-get update && apt-get -u -d -y dist-upgrade &&
apt-get autoclean'
alias apt-install='apt-get install'
alias apt-remove='apt-get --purge remove'
If you have a 1 ghtz cpu+ and an adsl/cable connection and are
prepared for the extra work then I'd recommend Gentoo. I've been
using KDE 3.2-beta something for a couple of weeks now on a system
that is at least 50% "snappier" than Debian on the same hardware.
Right now, regardless of distro, the crossing over to a 2.6 kernel
is icky... I suspect 2.6.1 will have most of the low-latency patches
currently available for 2.4 and the in-kernel ALSA will hopefully
be updated so /dev/sequencer works in OSS mode (for sfxload/SBlive).
--markc
I am using unstable (pretty much all the time,
except of short period
when I tried testing) and can't see any reason why bothering with mixing
various versions (stable, testing, unstable).
There is no reason why most people would need to do this under normal
circumstances, I agree. It is, however, possible - and there's no harm in
finding out more about how apt works. :-) I'm running testing/unstable so I
can keep up to date with sound applications without having to update
everything else all the time. It makes sense to me, it doesn't have to make
sense to anyone else because I wouldn't recommend it as a course of action.