FINALLY! With my poorly dialup doing even a net install is too painful. And when I bought my sarge cd's it turns out the bonehead sold me the rc1 cd's and not the actual final cd's. Some progs are wonky. but I can get by. And the damn things, I had to copy 6 of them because the cd's were crappy. Litterally. They had like this film on them like he spilled soda or something and I couldnt' get it off. I just ordered my new set and waiting with spare HD in hand for my first test install. Always swap out the laptop HD to test new distros before installing on the backup computer and then the big box. Guess I know what I'm going to be doing next weekend.

That's how I have mine configured. So that means that I don't need to do a dist-upgrade? I can just chug along like normal and things will upgrade smoothly?

I'm being extra cautious because I had bad experience upgrading from one version to the next with Ubuntu. All kinds of stuff got hosed.

There is no upgrade that will happen with your current config. It is in essence a downgrade, because Etch moved from testing to stable.

To upgrade, you need to change Etch to Lenny or testing and update then dist-upgrade. If you leave it with Etch, you'll have stable on your computer, which I very much doubt you want on anything but a server.

Peace,
JimBass

Great stuff.

Good to see that the chaps have produced the goods.

There has of course been some delay in this release and every week that this release was delayed led, in my opinion, to a lowering of the regard that Debian was held in as end users come to expect regular release cycles. This is especially so for newer users who may not fully grasp the 'stable' Vs 'testing' paradigm. The next six months leave the stable branch up there with many of the other distributions in terms of usability, function and most importantly offering a fundamentally modern system.

It will be interesting to see if this gap between the planned release of stable and the actual release of stable is significantly reduced next time around. That will to me indicate the direction that the Debian team are pursuing, is it the 'when it's ready' philosophy or the 'when we promised' idea.

Somehow I think I prefer the 'When it's ready'...

I think if you're using testing then you should be doing dist-upgrade instead of upgrade anyway. I always use dist-upgrade anyway whether I'm using testing or stable. There is only really potential for things to get messed up after you've changed your sources.list.

I almost always do a dist-upgrade. Ofcourse the usual advice ***read what is being removed***

Snippets from a nicely written review.

That is indeed a fine review of Debian, rickh:-) Thanks for that! I'm going to try my netinstall at the end of this week. Ubuntu and several other distros owe Debian a lot for their success.

Only five packages upgraded today - that was anti-climatic

I only had 3... 196 yesterday, but only three today. As usual, no noticeable changes to any of my programs... then again the two programs i use most often (firefox and mercury messenger) I downloaded and installed myself.

Is there somewhere on my system that I can look and see that I am actually running lenny? I just think it would be neat to see that somewhere...

cat /etc/debian_version

I think there is a long list of packages queued up to get into Sid, but the ftpmasters are holding them back while other housekeeping jobs get accomplished. Sid has evidently been rebuilt from scratch since all packages there are on the list of Packages added in the last 7 days.

One that has slipped into Sid is k3b version 1.0, but it's broken, and now my aptitude is broken until whatever pieces are still missing come into view. (install -f) didn't help.

Even after the queued packages get into Sid, they'll have to sit there for 10 days or more before they start moving into Lenny. So I guess we should all take a deep breath and exercise patience.

For what i heard there´s some major bugs in etch, check this out that presents a problem for me... iproute is really important in my server...

This should fix it

apt-get remove libk3b2

K3b upgraded and brought in libk3b3 but they forgot to mark it as a conflict so that libk3b2 would be removed. (That's also why install -f didn't fix it since apt sees no problems.)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has, for some reason, a major chip on his shoulder regarding Debian. I don't know what his problem is, but I wouldn't accept his word alone regarding the seriousness of problems in anything Debian related. Reading the article, it appears that the solution is simple, and was overlooked simply because no one reported it as a bug.

At any rate, obviously, potential problems are being discussed at a very high level and will be addressed quickly. Even Debian is not perfect, only closer than anyone else.

**********
...and removing libk3b2 did solve my problem. Thanks.