[ale] Installing current Debian Sid

[Damon L. Chesser]

On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 17:48 -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> I'm pretty sure you encountered problems because testing ("squeeze")
> is currently frozen. When testing gets frozen, sid feels some side
> effects. While testing is frozen it gets the primary focus and sid
> gets to have broken packages for longer than normal.
> 
> Back when I ran Debian on a desktop (admittedly several years ago now)
> I had no problems installing stable and then dist-upgrading to sid.
> But I learned real fast not to try and even do an `apt-get update &&
> apt-get upgrade` when testing was in freeze mode.

I to have gone from stable to sid with out much hassle, just not on this
version of stable to sid.  I don't think this has anything to do with a
freeze, I think the jump is just to big at this point in time.  I might
have been able to go from stable to sid on just a base system, did not
try.  I started on Potato, fwiw.
> 
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Damon L. Chesser <damon at damtek.com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
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> 
> 
> 


-- 
Damon
damon at damtek.com