[wplug] Debian CD's

[K G]

I'll try not to repeat too much... 

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 08:00:46AM -0500, Weber, Larry A wrote:
> I have been trying out different Linux Distros and would like to try Debian
> on my next machine.  From their site, I see that it is provided on 7 CD's
> (plus 7 more for the source).  Any Debian users out there who can help me
> understand why there are so many Debian CD's?  

It's a pretty big distribution, but you definitly shouldn't download all
7 CDs. You should get the first one (that's enough for a basic install),
and you should get the rest of the packages from the network (if you
have any kind of networking). You can also just download the first two
floppies and install everything else from the network. 

> I also saw that the latest distro is nearly a year old.  Do you expect
> there will be a new one before the end of the year?

Debian takes a long time to make sure everything in the stable release
is stable, and once a release goes stable there's very little change to
it apart from security related stuff. 

If you want a little newer stuff, you can switch to testing which is
actually pretty stable. If you want the shiniest new software with all
the inherent bugs, then you can do unstable. 

Currently woody is the stable release, sagre is the testing release, and
sid is always the unstable release. The best part is that it's really
easy to mix and match. I run woody, but have openoffice installed from
sarge. A friend of mine runs gaim from unstable on a woody system. Once
you have the sources and pin priorities set up, 

apt-get -t unstable gaim

will install gaim from the unstable release (and upgrade all the things
you need upgraded). I wouldn't recommend doing that too much while
you're ner to Debian though -- dpkg is really good, but that doesn't
mean you can't mess it up. 

Kuzman

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