I just installed sarge (testing) with debian-installer, i only chose 'desktop-environment' is there a way to upgrade to sid? (I want to use the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird). Is there a way I can recover the system if something goes wrong during the update?

Downgrading is difficult. Sarge is stability, but if you really want Sid, change in your /etc/apt/sources.list the reference to testing or sarge in sid and apt-get upgrade first.

Sid is unstable, so be prepared to have broken packages.

yeah, I had sid and I used to dist-upgrade it every week and it crached compeltely yesterday, I would advise people to stick with sarge.
BTW, should he change the reference to testing or unstable if he wants sid?

my sid is fine, and i update/dist-upgrade every day.

"Howto upgrade from sid to sarge?"

Please go to debian.org, read 'packages' and documentation, so you don't make this kind of mistake and know what you are talking about.

That was a typo, my first posting shows I already have sarge and want to upgrade to sid, I have read the debian package info (I assume you're talking about packages.debian.org) and much of the documentation exstensively.

Upgraded to sid, I think the root cause of all my problems is that I enabled framebuffer mode, I have and NVidia card and I don't think it likes fb (or something else about my hw is funny).

GDM crashes the moment it starts, I managed to from tty2, but GNOME crashes once I click on "Applications". Is there any way to turn off framebuffer other than reinstalling.

disable framebuffer in /etc/lilo.config (i think that's the file, i use grub),

in the line:

vga=xxx, edit it to say:

vga=normal

save and exit
reboot

as root, with your favorite editor go to /etc/apt/sources.list, comment or erase the security lines (no security updates in sid, except the one that comes with the packages) just leave the ones for Debian and Debian Non-US, substitute the word 'sarge or testing' for 'sid'

here's my sources.list:

#Debian
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free

#Debian Non-US
deb http://non-us.debian.org/ sid/non-US main contrib non-free

install discover mdetect read-edid

just to ease auto-detection, maybe it will help.

in #debian in the IRC, were commenting about bugs with kde and gnome in sid, check the BTS (bug tracking system) and look for those 2 programs, in the meantime, apt-get install xfce4, you might get a pleasant surprise.

I use grub, it's the default with debian-installer. /etc/lilo.config does not exist.
I used xfce4 on Morphix LightGui, don't like it, and i'm pretty sure that it wouldn't work either. I don't think this is a sid bug, just an ID10T error, isn't there a way to reconfigure a package, I was asked whether to enable fb, there must be a way to disable it.

Commenting out the line that mentions "UseFBDev" in your /etx/X11/XF86Config-4 file might help.

Thank you very much, the last suggestion fixed it. At the top of document, it said to run That was the step executed during apt-get dist-upgrade that I had messed up on. Once I told it not to use framebuffer, everything started working again. I am posting this from sid w/ Firefox 0.91, exactly what I wanted!

Note: I seem to have gotten rid of KDE in the process (at one point I tried just removing everything till I hit the bad package) so I actually gained something, HD space!