[sheflug] Ubuntu/Debian (was Re: Apache,shtml and php config. problem)

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks [at] xxxxxxxxx>]

Adam Funk wrote:
> On Monday 14 August 2006 23:11, Ruth Gunstone wrote:
> 
>>> I have heard Ubuntu is pretty good over a range of hardware and some
>>> people say it is the distro most likely to install on new hardware
>>> but that may be because Ubuntu takes Debian and makes it *really*
>>> unstable ;)
>> Ouch! ;-)
> 
> I thought Ubuntu took "Debian testing/unstable" and made it usable!
lol!
Perhaps, but methinks beauty is in the eye of the beholder on this one. 
  Debian doesn't have the prettiest installation I've seen but then 
neither really does Ubuntu.
> 
> I used Debian faithfully for years, but my last `aptitude dist-upgrade` 
> ended with this:
> 
> 281 packages upgraded, 177 newly installed, 464 to remove and 122 not 
> upgraded.
> Need to get 302MB of archives. After unpacking 1033MB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] 
> 
> and I got tired of spending 30 to 60 minutes guessing at packages that 
> could be upgraded without removing any that I still needed.
> 
Happily cracking along with Debian unstable on my laptop and I have 
written a basic shell script to do the updating for me.  I really should 
turn that into a cron job at some point.  I use apt-get update and then 
force apt-get upgrade with a -y.  This provides a blanket upgrade to all 
installed packages - which obviously has it's risks.

I've only ever used the dist-upgrade option to go from stable to unstable.

You can use /etc/apt/preferences file to pin any package you need to 
keep at a specific version.  I have no clue whether you can still do 
that under Ubuntu's auto-update routine.

Regards

L.

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