On Tue, Mar 25, 2003, Chris D wrote: > Remember, unstable -- will be unstable. > > If X4.2 is the only thing you *need* then install the base system of > stable (Woody) and add this to your /etc/apt/sources: > deb http://people.debian.org/~blade/woody/i386 ./ > then run tasksel and add your X-Server.
Mick seems to have had trouble with this, see the archives. As for unstable, there are two problems: it is indeed unstable, and there are a lot of updates. Major userland packages such as mozilla are broken in some releases. Sometimes, when a major transition (for example, GNOME1.4 -> GNOME2, GCC2 -> GCC3.2) is taking place the breakages can last a while. I find that it's useful to watch for major bugs in my favourite packages at http://bugs.debian.org/, and it's also useful to be subscribed to their devel-announce list. Unstable packages also update fairly regularly (the same package might appear three times in a week if major changes are being made). Needing to download 100MB of packages after a week of no upgrades is not uncommon. While you don't *have* to update, and you can selectively update packages by using apt-get install rather that apt-get dist-upgrade. You could also use aptitude, which I found very useful once I'd revised my initial impression that it was meant to be a "Linux beginner" tool, when it's actually a fairly advanced package manager with a set of keybindings I found rather arcane[1]. In particular, aptitude will show you all versions of any package that it can find in your source lists. My advice would actually be to use Debian's testing branch rather than its unstable branch. I do this, and install only certain packages from unstable (for example when unstable has a major revision of a package like Mozilla or GNOME). -Mary [1] /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README on your Debian system is a much more useful resource than many of the other READMEs in /usr/share/doc -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
