On 04/10/10 01:36, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
if you don't mind running old versions of software... which I do...
I take it that you don't feel that "pacman -Syu" or if applicable
something like "yaourt -Syu –aur" Will bring your Arch system as fully
up to date as installing the latest Ubuntu release, followed by an
apt-get dist-upgrade would???
Oh, I meant that... um... you missed the rest of the quote. I was saying
that people who don't mind running old versions of software can use
Ubuntu Long-Term-Support releases or Debian Stable (or late-cycle
Testing) or the like. Then those people only have to upgrade once every
few years. Which is less frequent than 6 months. Thus, they get one
advantage of rolling-release systems (namely, not having to upgrade
every six months!). At the expense of using two-or-three-year-old
software a lot.
I'll agree that there's good stuff in the other wiki(s). But the Arch
wiki impressed me with how it approaches how-to instructions with
regard to helping users who really don't have a clue yet, work their
way through it.
I agree! I guess. I learned Linux around five or six years ago by
installing Gentoo based on its wiki instructions. There is no realistic
way for me to compare that to my Arch experience. Installing Ubuntu
first would've been easier but I would've not come to understand nearly
as quickly how my system really "works". (And so I've been able to
witness HAL coming and going (affecting X configuration file formats),
and D-Bus becoming nigh on mandatory, and other neat stuff (sort of
a.k.a. bloat! -- of course it has purposes).)
I guess I've always tried to use cli methods because I've never been
comfortable attempting major upgrades while depending on the X server.
Oh, I agree that upgrading from CLI feels much safer! In fact, once
upon a time an Xubuntu GUI-based upgrade broke X and had to be fixed
from the console. It's nice to know that there is at least a
semi-supported way to do it...
Incidentally Isaac, if you've got the spare partition to do a 'parallel' fresh
install, you could still do an upgrade without risking the existing installation...
1) Duplicate current installation on the separate partition.
2) edit target fstab to reflect it's new location.
3) add an appropriate entry to grub
4) assuming the cloned installation works properly, you can upgrade one,
while keeping the the other untouched...
ooh! clever! Possibly even worth it in some cases.
-Isaac
