On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 Lee A. Azzarello asked: none Only when I need to. Recently I rebuilt my system starting with the etch network installer after breaking my system (and corrupting my apt database) after accidentally starting to upgrade hundreds of packages after requesting a package that needed to upgrade the C libraries to libc6. Quite a bit of configuring needed, even tho I could use many of my previous /etc files. There is nothing like having a stable production system! Once every two years or so. Just yesterday a new shiny 2.6.15.6 with 1000Hz clock and PREEMPT (after reading about it here.) I've been doing okay with a stock debian 2.6.12, but wanted to try flipping a few kernel settings. Not much need for patching these days. The more heavy duty realtime stuff loads your system quite a bit. In the sarge days I would try to install a package with apt-get, and if I needed something newer would recompile from sources. 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.) In my new system, I thought I would stay with the 'etch' sources, but the siren call of prepackaged binaries has brought me to add the 'sid' package listings as well. The world is different now. I had spent weeks trying to get ardour to compile in the old days. Now I find a site that has a ardour .deb that came up right the first time! (Broken now, dunno what I did...) With the etch installer I got a 2.6 kernel out of the box. Alsa is already in there. Hotplugging USB and Firewire works much better, and now I'm about to test out the udev system for populating device nodes in /dev. Exim4 for debian comes with some simple templates for typical mail configurations. Using libc6 I can use rdiff-backup, which is the easiest, most painless, reliable system that I've ever used to back up my system. I just hacked up some scripts that use 'parted' and rdiff-backup to clone my system to another drive, with the added advantage of storing multiple file versions if I ever need them. Also works over NFS. I can use new stuff like 'powertweak' which can show me pages and pages of hardware and software parameters I could spend my whole life learning to diddle. I can find .debs for stuff like mplayer, and install the codecs I need to be able to see flash and videos and stuff and that is, I have to say, cooler than a text-and-images browser experience. 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 -- Joel Roth

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 22:31:48 -0500 (EST) "Lee A. Azzarello" <lee(a)rockingtiger.com> wrote: The nice thing is that debian is so good, that i don't even need a community site for it. I sometimes ask a question in the #debian channel on irc.freenode.org, but that's about it. I'm a pretty long time user though. Errm, depends. Once or twice in a month i do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade Depends. Once a month maybe, or every second month. I run debian unstable (dunno what it's release name is). Backporting is too much of a hassle.If i build from source i don't bother to make a debian package. I just install it to /usr/local and am done with it. Flo -- Palimm Palimm! http://tapas.affenbande.org

Lee A. Azzarello wrote: No particular community. I'm running plain Debian and compile very few applications by myself. I installed Debian slink in 1999, upgraded to potato in 2000, and switched to sid in 2000. Every upgrade is done with apt-get upgrade. I never re-installed in 7 years. Every few months, when something new seems appealing enough (better hardware support, better latency, bug fixed) to make me build a new kernel. I am tracking sid since 6 years. I apt-get upgrade every week. It is rock-solid and never broke since I discovered apt-listbugs. -a.

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 22:31:48 -0500 (EST), Lee A. Azzarello was like: Does this list count? Manually with apt-get (or sometimes synaptic). I have never felt comfortable with "apt-get-upgrade". I never have for audio work (yet). I ran Demudi as my first audio system. It worked well (pretty much everything worked right off the bat) but it didn't perform as well as WinXp/Sonar on the same hardware. I felt I could get better performance with a leaner system so I built a Debian system from scratch (using netinstall and manually selecting/installing programs) which gets much better latency numbers than Demudi. I could never get Ubuntu to work with my Delta 1010 cards. I understand that it does work, but I could not make it happen. I use etch - I tried sid but there were too many dependency/broken app problems with the software I wanted to use. In all the years I have used Debian (since 2.2 - potato?) I have rarely used stable. Ruben --------------------------- Debian Etch 2.6.15-1 Ardour 0.99-3+b1 AMD Athlon XP 2000 Delta 1010

I guess I _have_ to answer this one. Lee A. Azzarello wrote: A/DeMuDi & Debian Multimedia Project apt-get (synaptic actually) I don't, I let Free do it. I _am_ running real Debian ;) No, I'm running stable + A/DeMuDi-1.2.1 + backports. I'm really close to upgrading to etch + A/DeMuDi-1.3.1 as the situation is getting silly. I think you know what I mean already. My system is getting like a Military Academy. One of the spoof ones. However, I can still make music on it, so I'm resisting the temptation to upgrade. JACK works perfectly here. cheers, tim hall