alright, someone told me today, that he installs (he's supposed to be fairly knowledgable) unstable on workstations and testing on servers

alright, this seems backwards to me?

I've always, always had the impression that you put your most stable on your server-- so why not woody or even unstable (assuming testing is the least stable)

maybe I am just carrying over some sort of windows retardation, but...

anyways, he also said to stick w/ the .deb's-- so I can use apt-get; which makes sense, but is there some reason I can't install from source other than that?

anyway, comments would be appreciated. thanx

Nate Snow

AFAIK you can still compile from source, but check to make sure that the package your downloading isn't already avaliable via; apt-get install packagename

Woody is the stable version

Sarge is the testing, and will later turn into stable, see this as a beta version.

Sid is the unstable, this is all new packages, see this as an alpha version, where you are never gurantueed that it's working (although this is rare)

So the ladder is, Stable, Testing, Unstable

And of course you can compile from source, it's your own choice, nothing stops you from doing it.