[NBLUG/talk] Debian

[Jeremy Turner]

On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 18:33, Steve wrote:
> Is the kernel up to date in this distro? (still downloading...) 
> Also can you apt-get the latest kernel? or is it roll your own.. I have no
> issues with rolling my own, been compiling linux kernels since 1994 or
> so haha.

The stable branch is more of a snapshot.  You won't see XFree86 4.3
officially released for woody. You won't see Gnome 2.2 released for
woody.  However, people have compiled their own working versions called
backports so you can have a semi-stable system.

> I know in RedHat you can use up2date to update your kernel,
> I've never tried it, but I always found it to be a neat idea.
> 

http://debianplanet.org has an article listed about compiling the kernel
the debian way (TM).  It makes things a little simpler, or you can
simply apt-get the latest stock kernel.  The latter has worked just fine
for me.

> Also switching to debian, am I going to find it lacking in areas?
> RedHat has always seemed to come with the goodies.  I am assuming that
> if I need/want something installed its as simple
> as apt-get install proggyname and then maybe some configing.

The weakness of Debian is often finding what I need.  In other words, I
want to install X, but what is it called?  There is a util called
apt-cache search <package_name>, but searching for 'x' will give a lot
of packages.  There also is http://packages.debian.org,
http://apt-get.org, and google.

And yes, apt-get is *that* easy.  You'll get a couple dialog boxes for
configuration questions, but nothing too bad.

> How often does Debian update? Dec 16, 2002, thats 6 months ago =)

Unstable and testing update every day.  There are new security patches
almost weekly available to download (via apt-get).  Generally, tho, a
newer major version of a package is not backported into a
previously-released version.

> Oh 1 more question, are there any Floppy setup disks for debian?  I have a
> laptop with out a CDROM drive that I would love
> to put linux on, I was going to use RedHat because its a 2 floppy disk
> download and then the rest is done over the net.  Does debian
> have something like this?

Yep.  If you have a fairly standard NIC (3c95x, eepro100, etc) you can
use two floppy disks to boot the install and grab everything else off
mirrors.  It takes a little bit of searching to find the floppy images,
but I can help you find them off-list if you'd like.

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Turner <jeremy at linuxwebguy.com>
The LinuxWebGuy