Yeah, I put Debian on my older notebook, and I agree that the "apt-get" 
feature is really cool.  I haven't had time to iron things out yet, though; I 
don't yet have sound working on it, for example.  Once I get everything 
figured out, I'd be tempted to switch to it for my primary systems.  I'll 
still have to use the other distros, though, because I'm developing LInux 
apps and I need to test them on all the platforms.

Vaughn

On Wednesday 13 November 2002 00:13, you wrote:
> Am 12. Nov, 2002 schwätzte Lynn David Newton so:
> >   Vaughn> I tend to agree with this philosophy. I
> >   Vaughn> upgraded my notebook from RH 7.1 to 7.3, and
> >   Vaughn> it was pretty hosed. I wiped the partition
> >   Vaughn> and did it as a new install (I'd ghosted the
> >   Vaughn> original) and it worked much better.
> >
> > That approach strikes me as being much like buying a
> > new house and moving into it rather than facing spring
> > cleaning every year.
> >
> > Whenever I build a system from scratch it takes me a
> > good week of my life to get all the stuff I use
> > installed and configured and working the way I want. It
> > was fun when computers were an obsessive hobby. Today I
> > can no longer afford to disable and play with my
> > computer for days at a time. It's like my automobile.
> > It's gotta work well, and it's gotta work now.
>
> Then you need to start using debian. Back when we were at Mot Matt got me
> to use debian. That was 1999. Since then I've just done updates[0]. For the
> latest bleeding edge it can take some knowledge of the dark arts of debian,
> but I know it won't take you much to figure them out.
>
> debian is stable.
> debian upgrades work.
> debian is stable.
>
> Not trying to start a distro war, but debian's dependency checking just
> rocks ( I do see occasional errors in testing ) and debian's conf file
> policy of not mucking with local changes is very strongly enforced.
>
> Other distros are supposed to be doing the same stuff. RH is one of them.
> None have as much experience with good updates as debian does.
>
> ciao,
>
> der.hans
>
> [0] There was one reinstall where the hard drive on my laptop went south.
> Two desktops had disks going bad. I actually used the one ( work wouldn't
> get me a new hard drive ) losing sectors for a month before copying
> everything to a new drive and continueing to use the old install.