[wellylug] 3 Questions

[Stephen Judd]

On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 21:01, Don Jones wrote:
> 2. Has anyone installed a PPC distro and have any recommendations of
> what to install on an imac 550/128, Yellow dog 3 looks pretty good,
> anything else, mandrake Debian? General PPC comments, warnings?

Debian installation is as scary on PPC as it is on x86 (read into that
what you will). Once I got over that hump, I had a very nice G3 laptop
running Debian, dual-booting MacOS9, and running MacOS 9 in mol. I have
no experience with YDL - once I had debian working, why would I bother?
;-)

It's been a couple of years since then, but I think it's probably still
true that PPC packages are a little more likely to have bugs, both
because of developers who assume x86 architecture, and because with
fewer users, fewer bugs are found and fixed. You may have to wait some
time for the latest and greatest kernel too.

The good thing about using Debian was debian-is-debian-is-debian, and so
all my distro-specific knowledge from x86 was still good.

> 3. I want to move to Debian on the desktop (x86) after having used
> mandrake/red hat for a few years. I use stable on servers and have never
> ventured into unstable/testing territory (or even run X), which one is
> better, how often are they broken? 

I use a mixture of testing and unstable on my desktop, and have
encountered exactly one bout of dependency hell in the 18 months I have
done so. Thus I have evolution 1.4.2, gnucash 1.8.4, and so forth, but a
more conservative array of most other things.

What I do is have a line in apt.conf like this:

	APT::Default-Release "testing";

That way, by default, I install from the testing repository. However, I
can specify unstable like this:

	apt-get install -t unstable somepackage1.1

and apt will install from unstable, and pull in the minimum packages
from unstable required to meet dependencies. Best of both worlds in my
opinion.

Debian testing = most other distro's stable. Debian stable is partly
about being defect free on all 11(?) platforms - testing is usually very
high quality on common platforms.

Stephen