Hi Andrew, everyone started at one point with linux, so keep up, as the learning curve is quite steep.
As a suggestion, look into "aptitude". aptitude has the advantage, that it will show you what it does, and especially for a beginner it might be helpful to see the consquences / dependencies of some packages. Aptitude is a little slow on arm, at least with its default configuration. But back to your dilemma. Going backward -- from lenny to etch -- is usually not that easy, so I suggest that you should stay with lenny or resinstall. Lenny is not that bad after all -- it is the next stable and Debian is "frozen", so thats not so far away. (September, ASFAIR) And don't think testing will crash every five minutes. Coming from the windows world "testing" might sound like that, but I am running sid (unstable) for years and had seldom any show-stopping issues. And testing is "unstable with at least 10 days worth of safty-net" as once a friend told me. Short summary: I would stay at testing for the time being, stay at lenny if you want to go for a stable release. Regarding samba, I have the feeling that this is only a small "problem". If you want, mail the smb.conf to the list and many eyes can take a look at it. changes are good that you will get a solution or at least hints. > How do i go about reinstalling? do i need to revert to the thecus rom > or can > i reinstall debian another way? I have a 10GB raid1 root partition and > the > rest are data partitions so i would like to know if i can reinstall > whilst > keeping my data safe. Beside that I don't think that you need to reinstall, you do not need to revert to the Thecus image. I wrote a howto some time ago (but forgot to release it; now it is... ) at my blog, http://blog.coldtobi.de, how to load the debian installer into RAM and boot it from there. As a bonus, it won't get unbootable if flashing wents wrong. If you have your data on the separate partition, it is safe as long as you are careful with the debian installer. You only should format the 10G root one. (But it won't hurt to backup /etc, could safe you from some work) On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 14:12 +0100, Barry Tennison wrote: > Xming is quiet superb > (once you install xorg on the debian side) and gives you access to > almost all the gui stuff in debian from your windows desktop. I wonder how the performance is. The Thecus is a big one for a ARM, but ... -- Best regards coldtobi http://blog.coldtobi.de Life is more than binary.