On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 07:56 pm, tim hall wrote: > On Thursday 25 December 2003 08:46, Erik Steffl wrote: > > ?I am using unstable (pretty much all the time, except of short period > > when I tried testing) and can't see any reason why bothering with mixing > > ? various versions (stable, testing, unstable). > > There is no reason why most people would need to do this under normal > circumstances, I agree. It is, however, possible - and there's no harm in > finding out more about how apt works. :-) I'm running testing/unstable so I > can keep up to date with sound applications without having to update > everything else all the time. It makes sense to me, it doesn't have to make > sense to anyone else because I wouldn't recommend it as a course of action. Good advice. A full "unstable" system take quite a bit of constant updating which would hurt on a 56k dialup connection so a good compromise is to run mainly as a "testing" system and only use "unstable" for the latest audio apps. I decided to update my mothers "unstable" system last night, after about 3 months, and it took 248Mb of downloads to do so. For anyone wondering how to... edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and add APT::Default-Release "testing"; make sure you have testing AND unstable targetted in your /etc/apt/sources.list, such as (pick a mirror nearer yourself)... deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free and do an apt-get update then apt-get -t unstable whatever. I use these aliases in my .bashrc for conveniance... alias e='nano -w -t -x -c -R ' alias edapt='e /etc/apt/sources.list' alias apt-update='apt-get update && apt-get -u -d -y dist-upgrade && apt-get autoclean' alias apt-install='apt-get install' alias apt-remove='apt-get --purge remove' If you have a 1 ghtz cpu+ and an adsl/cable connection and are prepared for the extra work then I'd recommend Gentoo. I've been using KDE 3.2-beta something for a couple of weeks now on a system that is at least 50% "snappier" than Debian on the same hardware. Right now, regardless of distro, the crossing over to a 2.6 kernel is icky... I suspect 2.6.1 will have most of the low-latency patches currently available for 2.4 and the in-kernel ALSA will hopefully be updated so /dev/sequencer works in OSS mode (for sfxload/SBlive). --markc
