[Techtalk] dealing with debian

[Stephanie Boyd]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 06:44:28PM -0500, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> I'm looking for some other folks that rely on package managers for their
> software installations. For somethings like Apache, Procmail, fetchmail,
> mutt, vim, etc package managers are lurvly! But i'm finding it frustrating
> for other things like: Open Office (getting the package manager to work) 
> and Mozilla (getting the latest version).

Openoffice is only currently available in unstable afaik.  Assuming that you
are running stable/testing, you would have to explicitly ask apt to install
the package from unstable, using:
    
apt-get install -t unstable packagename

This will only work if you also have unstable in your sources.list

If you wish to go down this road while still grabbing the rest of your
install from stable, you will have to edit the file /etc/apt/preferences in
order to keep a mixed system.  See:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-apt-get.en.html

for details on how to do this (section 3.10 in particular).

Another thing which you may wish to consider before introducing packages
from unstable to a stable system is that they may not work:  the package
itself may depend on newer versions of other packages, which may in turn not
work with other packages which are already installed on your system.  I
don't know about openoffice - I've been running it quite happily for some
time now on testing and it works fine, but this is a consideration.

Finally, if you want to run a lot of software which is not available in
stable, you may wish to consider running testing.  There is a risk attached,
of course, but it's much easier to get the latest versions of software.
(WARNING!  Although testing generally works quite well, it is entirely
possible to hose your system through installing things which don't quite
work - subscribing to Debian mailing lists to find out 'what's broken'
before runnning dist-upgrades is a good idea.)

   	   Regards,
	   	Stephanie

-- 
Stephanie Boyd				http://www.ixtab.org.uk/slb

'The computer continued, brash and cheery, as if it were selling detergent.'
				-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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