[lug] Upgrading Debian Questions

[Nate Duehr]

> 1) If I add the testing packages to source.list now and do the
> resulting upgrades until the release, what would happen when I ran
> apt-get dist-upgrade when the release was finally made?

Undefined results.  :-)

In the past, there wasn't a "testing" version -- it's new to this round of
the so-called release cycle (of course, you have to actually RELEASE
something for it to be a release cycle, but I'm just digressing here...
heheh.. not being mean to folks who have contributed to Debian their time
and efforts, it's still a great system, but no one I know running it will
run Potato on a desktop nowadays... it's just too old.  It works fine on
servers though with a few package upgrades from testing on various
things.)...

Anyway... things that have happened to me in the past using unstable and
going to stable usually revolve around really weird file and directory
permissions being left behind by goofed up install scripts in the early
packages.

I poked around in the past and compared various things between a "used to be
unstable, now stable because it was released" and a "freshly installed from
new stable" and they weren't 100% the same, but at the same time I never
really found anything so dangerous or crazy that I would have minded just
leaving it alone...

I guess if it was a heavy multi-user system and not home machines, there are
a few situations where I would have been nervous about the file perms and
stuff like that, but I would have never auto-updated from unstable on a
machine like that either without SERIOUSLY looking over things every time
something got updates.

> 2) If I have a Windoze box with a Linux-ready partition, how do I
> install Linux (Debian) without the CDs?  I've installed Linux six
> times successfully (and many times unsuccessfully!) from CDs, but not
> without.

I think the latest floppies from the FTP site have a Network Install option
on them.  Sometimes the boot-floppies team's stuff is ultra stable and works
in woody/testing, sometimes it's broken... usually it's working okay
though... again, have seen some weird file permissions from some sets of
floppies... patience is an excellent tool with Debian's installer at times.
:-)

> 3) When is this InstallFest everyone is talking about?

Uhh... dunno.  :-)

Nate "the somewhat out of touch on the InstallFest thing, but likes Debian",
nate at natetech.com