Re: [PLUG] debian stable & 2.4?

[Will Dyson <will_dyson@pobox.com>]

kevin mudrick wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I just got a new (well, old) pentium pro 200 box that I'm going to be
> using as my in-house webserver and such.  I've installed debian potato on
> it, but then when I went to install a new 2.4 kernel on it, I realized I
> needed some packages upgraded.  Adrian Bunk used to have a debian site
> setup where he offered updated potato packages that allowed you to upgrade
> to 2.4, but, he has since quit debian, and taken the packages down too.
>
> So.. I'm left with options.. Upgrade to woody, Wait until the packages
> become available again, or see if I can manually find all those -bunk debs
> somewhere.
>
> What do you guys (and girls) think?  Should I just take the plunge with
> woody?  I'm running sid on my desktop machine, but I get squeamish
> thoughts at running a "testing" version on a box I kinda want to not break
> and stuff..

First question is why do you need to use a 2.4 kernel? A 
single-processor webserver should do just fine with a recent 2.2 kernel.

Assuming that you do have a good reason (like wanting IPTables) for 
using 2.4, then I'd go ahead with woody. Actuall broken packages very 
rarely make it into testing, because of the 2-10 day waiting period 
before a new package can be moved from unstable into testing. The 2 big 
problems with woody are:

1) That waiting period applies even to urgent security updates (usually 
just 2 days though).

2) Frequently, a package will make it into testing, but some of its 
dependancies will not (as bugs are found and fixed in unstable, the 
waiting period starts over). You then find that you can't install or 
update that package. This problem can be worked around by allowing 
specific packages from unstable to be installed. Damned if I can find 
the description of how to do that, though.


--
Will Dyson
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in 
mind at all times." -Bill Hicks


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