Best way to upgrade DSLForum: Apt-get Topic: Best way to upgrade DSL started by: adamsjw2 Posted by adamsjw2 on Mar. 15 2006,23:22
Hi all,Our church had a donation of some older PIII systems with 256 ram and 4 gig HD. I'm using these for free training of out of work folks. I just did a harddrive install and it went flawlessly. I've been using MEPIS for 3 years and setting up servers with straight Debian via net install. So I have some understanding of packages and APT, etc. I notice DSL isn't truly Debian so how should I do upgrades on these machines. apt-get update / upgrade, updated 3 packages. I notice the repository in sources.list is old stable. Is this the same as Woddy or Stable? If not, would it break DSL if I change the repo to Stable? Thanks, and how can I join in to help DSL? I have plent of Samba / Cups / Network experience. Jim A. Posted by roberts on Mar. 16 2006,01:19
All I will say, and it has been stated many times before...A traditional hard install is not the focus of DSL. Personally, I would recommend that you read up and learn about our frugal type install. With these machines, you have plenty of power. You gain easy updates, as DSL continues to improve. You also gain a near bulletproof base system, especially when the target is a new user. Again, this is my personal opinion. This is the area that I have an interest in and develop and support. Posted by adamsjw2 on Mar. 16 2006,01:22
Roberts,Thanks for the quick reply. Since I'm new to DSL, you're saying that the frugal install is best? If it's not too much trouble can give a quick response why? If that's the best, that's what I'll do. My experience as been with only HD installs, Gentoo, Debian, and some BSD. TIA, Jim A. Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 16 2006,01:39
I don't think he's saying frugal is necessarily best, but he prefers it. Frugal is not really best if you want to run DSL on a very limted amount of ram (less than 32mb, for example) and install additional software at the same time. There are a couple of threads discussing the pros and cons of frugal vs debian style installation, such as:< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....83;st=0 > Posted by adamsjw2 on Mar. 16 2006,02:38
mikshaw,Thanks for the thread url. It seems most of the folks there choose frugal, but I'm not sure why from reading the posts. I may frugal one machine and keep this machine I've hd installed on today and see if I can make up my own mind. These machines aren't ancient, PII 333 with 128-256 meg ram. The HD install is working great so far, but I'll wait and pass judgment after I've tried both. Thanks, Jim >A Posted by Nym1 on Mar. 16 2006,02:43
The following essay re. the development of DSL and the "frugal"install is quite enlightening."A Developer's Perspective of Damnsmall Linux (DSL)" < http://www.shingledecker.org/dsl.html > Posted by adamsjw2 on Mar. 16 2006,02:53
Nym1,Thanks for the link. It is very helpful, but the writer's desire to be on the "cutting edge" is not a concern of mine. I will be teaching near senior-citizen types who have come from heavy manufacturing and for whom computer experience is almost "none." Not all of these machines have CDrom drives, so i would have to use a floppy to boot on most of them. Some no USB, so can't save the OS to a pen drive. It may be that because of the different configuration of the machines, will mean a different configuration of DSL. I was assuming, and maybe incorrectly, that there would be less admin hassle with an HD install. Again, experience will probably give me an answer and I'll post my comparison here. I've been using computers since the CPM days, so this type of comparison won't be very hard. Posted by brianw on Mar. 16 2006,04:43
My experience is that if the myDSL apps fill your needs and you want a very secure easy to recover system then the frugal install seems to be the way to go. For me I use a traditional HD install because I am constantly adding things using synaptic and compiling in things and I find it best to have the HD install. Also I only have 96 M ram and want my cdrom for other things, sometimes I boot up with my floppy inserted so I don't have the cdrom even in my laptop. I also like multi user logins, kids and wife use my laptop periodically so they have their own logins so I use KDM for graphical login.
Posted by humpty on Mar. 17 2006,06:10
Frugal installs apps during boot. The OS is always loaded 'fresh' so any upgraded app installs cleanly. I've run DSL quite comfortably on old office machines PII 128mb or 256mb rams (^&%* misey old company won't upgrade thier machines). A-hem anyway, it would depend on how big are the apps you run. If they are mostly deb packages, wouldn't you be stuck with deb anyway? |