The debian repositories work just fine for Mepis. The sources are already in the right place.
You want to select the right sources from the default ones and you can save yourself some work by ignoring them. I upgrade two computers like this all the time so that I know what's coming and pass on information at the CCCC. They are now more Debian than Mepis, but still have flash and all that. For other people, I use testing which is less work and delivers a better user experience. The easiest thing is to install off the CD and forget about it. If you really must upgrade, modify the /etc/apt/sources.list file to only include testing and wait a while. Without that, updates can be painful. Mepis uses unstable, so you typically get 300MB of changed libraries. I run two machines this way, with straight apt-get update/upgrade and dselect. Sometimes applications go away and don't come back for a while. Most of the time everything works, but it's the one thing that does not work that makes people wild. Push down to testing is less frequent and much less work. You can avoid full blow updates and install any software you want with synaptic and kpackage. I don't know how that magic works, but it's very cool. Most people are happy with what Mepis provides and don't feel the need to upgrade. My neighbor is using KDE 3.1. She loved it when she got it and loves it today. Testing would take her to KDE 3.2 or 3.3, which have one or two improvements she might notice. I'm leaving it alone until she asks me for something new. That may take a long time, because the machine she has does what she wants to do. She thanked me again two days ago. On Wednesday 23 February 2005 10:51 am, -ray wrote: > do these debian based distros have their own > apt repositories for updates? Is it safe/recommended to use the standard > debian apt repositories? > > ray >
