[Liverpool] Debian

[Richard Smedley]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 11:01 +0000, tony burrows wrote:
> Thanks for all the advice.  I think I'll start by just trying to sort 
> out the X server.  For now, I've got work to do.
> 
> I thought that woody was the most recent stable distro. 

Well, yes, sort of...

%%

Debian Stable - currently Woody - is released when absolutely 
everything is ready across all 11 architectures currently 
available. After release it is supported with constant
security updates but not significantly changed for a very
long time. This produces an extremely stable cross-platform
OS; as a side-effect it is full of very out-of-date packages =^)

If you are running a mission-critical server all of this is
good: Run Debian Stable.

%%

Debian Unstable - a.k.a. Sid, the child who broke the toys -
contains the latest releases from upstream developers, after
the Debian developers have packaged them up and got the
dependencies sorted out for Debian DNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd,
and GNU/NetBSD, and GNU/Darwin.... ;^)

Things are allowed to break here. I remember once PAM breaking
and those who had updated being locked out of their systems
(not a problem for me at the time as I had physical access)
Many people run Debian Unstable as their desktop distro.
I do myself on many of my machines.

%%

Debian Testing - currently Sarge.
After failing to show signs of overt malice for a couple of weeks
in stable, packages are booted across to Sarge, providing
various other guidelines are met (eg a GNOME upgrade takes
a bit of thought before being prepared for the next release
version).

Debian Testing will work fine for a home or small office server,
for anything important it's acceptable, as long as you know
what you're doing (o tempores, that we should have to add
this proviso when talking about server admins).

Anyway, there are 11,000 fairly up-to-date packages in Debian
Testing. Unless you particularly need something from Sid, or 
always want the latest, then start *here*

I tend to install Testing on friends' and relatives' PCs.

Sarge will be released ``when it's ready''. A re-write of the
installer that has to work perfectly across 11 different 
architectures is just one of the things that takes time before being
release-ready.

%%

Debian is a huge project. A collaboration between over a
thousand developers, and more than a million users. There
is nothing like it anywhere else in computing, welcome aboard :-)

 - Richard


--

``Life can only be understood backwards,
  but it must be lived forwards.''  - Kierkegaard