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On Tuesday 28 September 2004 2:44 pm, Grant Sewell wrote:
Distribution: stable (and non-US counterpart)
stable is for servers or other critical boxes that simply can't be allowed to crash and which need to pick up their own security patches/updates without intervention or faults. stable really is that, I've not heard of a Debian stable box crashing - at all. Mine is running 24/7 and has had no unscheduled downtime in 2 years. The only time it's been down at all was when I was adding sockets to the ring main in the office - if I could have run it on batteries for 2 days I would have! It's been a while since I've used a GUI box running stable - that was KDE 3.0, IIRC. All the answers are at debian: http://www.debian.org/releases/
frozen ("")
Not sure. From the name, I'd assume either the pre-release feature-freeze or a stable release that is so old it is no longer updated.
testing ("")
Updated packages, some of which may still contain issues to be resolved. Good for desktops, workstations etc. where you want to be more up to date than stable. Needs occasional maintenance to tidy up packages that didn't install fully. See the Debian FAQ for more information on what is “testing” and how it becomes “stable”. http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/
unstable ("")
Mine - it's one step from the CVS code. As soon as a package is released from CVS, the Debian package is updated by the maintainer and it ends up on my system within a couple of days. Sometimes you get broken packages, packages that don't install cleanly, but it doesn't crash. Needs a little more maintenance than testing and you should have some experience of handling apt-get, apt-cache, reportbug and dpkg before expecting to get along with unstable. KDE 3.3 currently. Again, I've been not only running the unstable flavour 24/7, I've been deliberately pushing it hard with regular compiles, regular bugs and segmentation faults, regular large downloads etc. as I've been writing and testing code for GnuCash/QOF. It still doesn't crash. (I'm almost wondering what it takes to make it crash!) Even an inadvertent infinite loop in code was caught without the system actually stopping. OK, it crawled for a while but it didn't fall over. The “unstable” distribution is where active development of Debian occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers and those who like to live on the edge. That'd be me then! :-)
potato ("")
Previous stable release.
woody ("")
Current stable release.
sid ("")
Current unstable.
progeny
Not sure. Check www.debian.org * The next release of Debian is codenamed ‘sarge’ -- no release date has been set * Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (‘woody’) -- current stable release * Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (‘potato’) -- obsolete stable release * Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 (‘slink’) -- obsolete stable release * Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (‘hamm’) -- obsolete stable release
be most applicable to a PPC setup on an OldWorld Mac?
It's more a question of what the machine will do once installed: 1. Server, perhaps a file server, email server - basically anything that doesn't run the eye-candy GUI stuff - stable. Mine is older than yours and can serve MP3 files in real time faster than my GUI workstation (which is some 50 times faster in theory) can play them. 2. Workstation: The GUI takes a huge amount of effort to run, so don't expect a lot if it's an old box. The choice of distribution won't really affect performance, except that KDE has become a lot more intensive as more and more happy-clicky user-friendly stuff is added. Maybe stable would be better than testing, if only because the workload is a little lighter but stable will eventually have updates to where testing is now. YMMV. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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