Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup

>I found my debian is way to old, comparing to the above list. My friend
>*just* installed for me from internet. what make this great difference?

Your friend must have installed slink, the current stable release … it's getting pretty old.

>Anyway, I'm goining to install potato myself. The problem is that I'm
>quite new to linux world, though not so much for unix. Could somebody
>list the first ABC steps to install a potato version from internet
>(good enough to me according to the list above), and where on the web
>the docs I can refer to, please?

www.debian.org should have everything you need. The installation notes for potato (on Intel architectures) are at this URL (recombine onto one line):

ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/doc/index.en.html

I guess that when potato releases then these will be on Debian's web server, too, but Netscape seems to be able to handle web pages on FTP servers OK.

>Can I use apt-get instead of dselect?

Yes, though I still think dselect's interactivity is useful in the installation phase; I think it makes it easier to see what's going on at that point. But for some strange reason I actually *like* dselect, so take this as you will. :)

>Also, is it difficult to migrate to woody once I've installed potato?

1) Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to woody rather than potato; 2) 'dselect' and 'Update', or 'apt-get update'. 3) Either 'dselect' and 'Select' followed by 'Install', or 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.

That's it. The only snags might be due to bugs in packages in woody, which you can expect to be a little more common than in potato. Debian is *good* at upgradeability - you should never need to reinstall.

>what if I want to upgrade some of my packages.

You can download packages from a Debian mirror and upgrade them using 'dpkg -i filename.deb', if you don't want to upgrade the whole distribution. You may have to download additional packages to satisfy dependencies (don't be tempted to override them unless you *really* know something's wrong; I used to make that mistake on Red Hat and it caused me a lot of problems).

For a while, you should be able to install woody packages on a potato system without having to download too many extra packages to satisfy dependencies. This probably won't be true forever, but it should be true for a while yet.

Colin Watson