Re: Anyone using x.org?

Sam Varghese wrote:
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> On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 10:03:33PM +1000 Russell Shaw said:
> 
>>Sam Varghese wrote:
>>
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>>>A couple of days back I decided to switch from xfree to x.org
>>>with rather disastrous results. I thought of the switch after finding
>>>that x.org had come into Debian testing which is what I use on my PC at
>>>home.
>>>
>>>Alas, it all went wrong and I lost even the GUI which I was using.
>>>Getting it back was a pain as many of the old xfree packages are now
>>>deprecated and no longer available.
>>>
>>>Anybody on the list who's switched over successfully?
>>
>>It works ok for me in debian sid. Been using it for last month or more.
>>It failed to run for me, but i fix everything at the command line. Can't
>>remember what was wrong. No big deal tho.
> 
> 
> I'm too green to go near Sid, I can't cope with the way it breaks once
> in a way. It could be that my problems were due to the fact that my XF86
> config file was generated by xfree itself, and not by debconf. I may
> give it a go again now as the xf86 file I have has been generated by
> debconf - and I know how to extricate myself if it goes wrong.
> Thanks for the input, it's good to see some discussion on the list after
> a few months.

After setting sources.list and apt.conf for sid/unstable debs, run
apt-get update then apt-get dist-upgrade. You might need to do some simple
manual fixing afterwards. After that, whenever you want a new package, just
apt-get it. Only need to run dist-upgrade once or twice a year. Despite the
name "unstable", i've only ever had problems during the occaisional dist-upgrade
which updates *every* package on the system. A *lot* can be learnt by reading
the debian-user list for a while, but it is high traffic. You can also read
(but not post) it from news:linux.debian.user

It is a good idea to have a second old pc that you can get on the web with,
if you break your main system. It allows you to be extra bold and reckless
in your system hacking;) I rarely need a second pc now, because i can
fix most breaks from the command line.

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