update to current

[cellx]

Hello,

I have used Redhat, Slackware, and all the *BSDs. Because I don't like the bloated approach of redhat I will probably go with a Debian box.

I have installed debian on on of my test boxes.
My questions are.
1) How do I get it up to date standards, such as gcc,make,openssh,bintools on debian. I'm aware of apt-get update,upgrade,install.

2) How do I safely upgrade to kernel 2.4.26 or 2.4.26? I know how to download from kernel.org/make menuconfig/make dep/make bzImage.


Thanks,
cellx

[cellx]

sorry for my earlier question, i should better ask. What's installed with SB Debian distrobution. program(s)/version.

thanks,
cellx

[knightfoo]

We install the stable release of Debian, code name "Woody". It still uses a 2.4.x kernel and "older" versions of most applications. I would not call it outdated, since Debian has a very strict quality assurance process and when they call something stable, it is definitely stable.

Of course if you want to live in the bleeding and get the latest/greatest of everything, you can always "apt-get dist-upgrade" to unstable. The unstable branch normally has the latest kernel within a week of release and new packages are being added constantly. I wouldn't recommend running unstable on a production server unless you are really good or really insane. :)

-knightfoo

[bow-wow]

FYI I tried upgrading just a few packages (just to debian "testing"!!) to get some newer features... I don't recommend it. After I did it I suddenly had updated packages to install every couple days. It was a pain. Then it became an even bigger pain trying to restore all the original packages when I decided to revert entirely back to debian "stable".

My advice is that if you need some newer versions of some packages, check out http://backports.org and see if they have what you need. This is what I'm using now and it is working much better than trying to bring in packages from "testing" or "unstable".

As far as the kernel goes... do you really *need* the new kernel? The debian "stable" kernel, 2.4.18, has all security fixes backported, and it seems to do just fine.

[knightfoo]

Testing and unstable are definitely not for the faint of heart. It is not often that things break, but when they do it may take some work to fix them. If you keep your old packages around you can just rollback anything that breaks. However, rolling back to stable is near impossible since it involves a glibc downgrade, which is normally a very bad idea on a remote system (but it is doable: static binaries of SSH and your favorite shell, maybe busybox-static too).

There are new packages every day because this is how often the Debian maintainers update their stuff. Pretty amazing, eh? You don't have to keep up with packages every day .. I normally only upgrade when there is a security or bug fix. I normally keep a test box running with the latest and greatest so I can make sure nothing breaks before I upgrade production servers.

-knightfoo

[bow-wow]

I only upgraded about a dozen packages (not the whole system) to testing to but still there were all kinds of new updates almost every night. I just didn't have the time to examine what was and wasn't a security update. With the stable packages I just install all updates. (well, I do test and plan kernel updates beforehand--that's a bit riskier IMO),

There are a lot of things I like about Debian, but a lot of other things to which I'm not accustomed. It's a relationship in development :)

[JonTrainer]

I've had the same issues as bow-wow. I've upgraded a "few" packages to testing and now have constant updates, but even worse than that is dependency conflics when trying to install or upgrade other packages. Namely perl based applications.

Since, I'm planning an upgrade to a new server, I'm not going to try too hard to fix this. But the new server will be strictly stable with upgrades from backports.org.

Trying to maintain a mixed environment is just too time consuming.