Hello

jturba@gmail.com (<jturba@gmail.com>) wrote:

> Security;
> I was under the belief that I should apt-get update/upgrade with only
> the security line uncommented to get useful security updates. Is your
> point that there is no need to run the security upgrades if I am
> running unstable? There are no security upgrades available? How do I
> get security upgrades while running unstable?

You get security fixes in unstable as soon as upstream fixes the problem
in their code, and the Debian package maintainer packages the new
version and makes an upload to unstable. There is no support for
unstable from the Debian security team. Uncommenting all other lines
does not work at all - because you use unstable, your packages have
higher versions of those in stable and those in the stable security
archive.

> I guess I am confused by the naming conventions. I thought that by
> using unstable (not Woody/Sid) in sources.list I would isolate myself
> from the names and adhere to the unstable branch.

Yes, that is true. You can also use sid unstead - unstable always uses
the same codename. You should however comment out or remove the
stable/woody entries and run apt-get update, then aptitude. Check in
the section of installed but outdated/locally created packages. Maybe
you have some stuff installed from Woody that has been removed from
Debian by now - you won't get any updates/fixes for those packages
anymore.

> I will install apt-listchanges, x-window-system-core, and upgrade to
> the 2.6.15 kernel. After that I will dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and
> try startx again.

Good idea.

> According to debian_version I am running testing/unstable. Is that a
> good situation? Does that cause problems, would I be better off
> running unstable? If my source.list is unstable how did I draw in
> testing?

Unstable and Testing always tell you they are testing/unstable. This
allows the packages with /etc/issue (the file with the version) to
migrate from unstable to testing without any changes. Only when Testing
is frozen to prepare a new stable release, this is changes in Testing.

best regards
Andreas Janssen

--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674 ICQ #17079270
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps-sarge.html