I feel like the criticisms leveled against Debian here are a bit unfair. Yes, Debian Stable is rather out of date by the middle of Debian's development cycle, but the same can be said of ubuntu LTS and pretty much every other LTS edition of a distro that offers an LTS release. And that comparison is probably the most important thing to remember about Debian stable: What Debian calls Stable, just about any other distro would call LTS. Debian Testing, while not fully up-to-date, generally has the latest stable release of most actively maintained packages, and sometimes even release candidate or solid beta versions. If there's a newer version and it's not in testing, usually it's either completely new or unstable stumbled upon a release critical bug(e.g. Orca 3.36.4 never made it to Testing due to the breakage it caused, but Testing now has Orca 3.36.5). I'm pretty sure Debian actively discourages people from running Testing on production workstations, but my experience back when I used Vanilla Debian and upgrading everything non-Knoppix-specific to the version provided by Testing on my Knoppix-based setup suggests Testing is, on average, at least as stable as many STS releases of other distros, a sentiment I've heard echoed by many other Debian Testing users... And while it's a bit more advanced, though still infinitely easier than compiling everything yourself, you can have both stable and testing in your sources.list, set stable as the default release, and then manually upgrade just select packages to their Testing version, which will only upgrade other packages if the testing version of the selected package depends on a newer version. This method also leaves open an easy downgrade path if a new version does break something(though again, if the package was already sourced from testing, and there's a broken upgrade, you might be downgrading further than the previous testing version). Debian Unstable is where you start risking random package upgrades breaking important stuff, and even then, my ventures into Debian Unstable have been smoother than what I remember from running Ubuntu Unstable back in the day or with Windows 98 or vanilla XP before I freed myself from Microsoft's shackles. If there was an official Debian package for SBL and switching from espeakup to SBL as the default console screen reader was as simple as install SBL, run a script that makes it the default, and reboot and I could figure out how to launch Firefox+Orca as a stand-alone application without the need for a full desktop, I'd switch back to Vanilla Debian in a heartbeat... though I'd probably still keep a DVD of the latest Knoppix configured to boot in Adriane by default around as a rescue disc(unless someone has a better suggestion for a Live environment to boot up and use partimage from for backing up and restoring images of a root partition). _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list