[ale] Installing current Debian Sid

[Damon L. Chesser]

Someone, new to linux it seems posted an email about Debian and trying
to upgrade to Sid.  They said it broke the install.  I just installed
Debian stable onto my laptop, then dist-upgraded to Sid.  It did break
the install.  Udev needed to be updated, the kernel needed to be updated
and the following mess had many broken packages that would only be fixed
by using the manual (and dreaded) dpkg -i  --forced-$FOO options (See
dpkg --forced-help).  I thought it was to much a PITA so I re-installed.

This time, I only installed a base install of Stable.  Changed sources
to point to Testing, upgraded, dist-upgraded (using apt-get, not
aptitude upgrade).  Changed sources to Sid, upgraded, then
dist-upgraded.  When I was done, I ran tasksel, checked "desktop" and
made sure "standard" and "laptop" were also checked.  tasksel dutifully
installed gnome-desktop-environment for me.  Painless.

The moral of the story?  The move from current stable to unstable has
big, big changes so only install a minimum system if you want to make
that move.  Once you are up and running in Sid, make SURE you install
apt-listbugs as well.

After a year long love affair with first Ubuntu, then Fedora 13 (Ubuntu
10,04 is way to buggy for my use on my hardware) I am back to Debian.  I
forgot how pretty it was and how fast it works on a similarly configured
desktop.

HTH


-- 
Damon
damon at damtek.com