[Gllug] KDE and Debian

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 07:04:07PM +0100, Xander wrote:
> I am have just installed Debian (this will be my first Debian system :-)
> 
> I installed evolution from the ximian mirror on mirror.ac.uk and I have
> found a KDE 2 mirror after much searching at
> http://sapi.vlsm.org/DLL/debian-kde/dists/stable
> 
> I must say that KDE for Debian does not seem to be readily found!!!

There are no official KDE packages for Potato because the licensing
issues for QT hadn't been resolved when Potato was released.  You can
install it from unofficial sources but you may encounter dependency
problems when you upgrade to Woody and get the official packages - and
KDE causes enough headaches of that kind at its best.

For a workstation you should really upgrade to Woody (testing) or even
Unstable (Sid).  Potato is quite out of date now and only suitable for
those production servers where rock solid stability is demanded. 

> In addition I know it may seem strange to be chasing evolution and kde
> at this time (as I have not got X working yet :-).

Another incentive to upgrade, X configuration is noticeably easier on
Woody.

> 
> I have installed potato; however my graphics card is an SiS6300
> according to lspci.  This was supported under RH7.2 and RH7.3.  It is
> not listed as being supported by the Xservers on potato as far as I can
> see.  I guess my options are to compile X from source or upgrade to
> unstable.  The former I can do though pain it may be.  How would I
> upgrade to the unstable or does anyone have any other recommendations.

Upgrading from one version of Debian to the next is disgustingly easy.
Go through each line in /etc/apt/sources.list and edit the third field
in each.  This is the field that specifies which version to use, either
by level (e.g. stable, testing) or name (potato, woody etc).  When I
switched from potato to woody I changed from this:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian potato main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/non-US potato/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/non-US potato/non-US main contrib non-free

To this:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian woody main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian woody main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/non-US woody/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/non-US woody/non-US main contrib non-free

Note: I use the names, rather than the levels.  In the near future woody
will become stable and a new testing version will be named (Sid is
always unstable).  If you use stable or testing as the keyword then you
may find yourself inadvertently upgraded at that point.

Having made that simple change, simply run

	apt-get update

and then

	apt-get dist-upgrade

You may have to run dist-upgrade 2 or 3 times to complete the process,
especially if you have problems configuring packages on which others are
dependent.  Don't panic, just run through the procudure.

-- 
Bruce

I unfortunately do not know how to turn cheese into gold.
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