[nmglug] Questions About Dual Booting From A USB Drive

[Mark Galassi]

    >>  That is a good idea.  I recommend straight debian or ubuntu or
    >> mepis.  Ubuntu and Mepis are both debian distros where you can
    >> put the standard debian testing or unstable servers in
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list, so you get the full body of Debian
    >> packages.

    William> So I don't actually know all that much about Debian.  For
    William> straight Debian, do you have to choose between stable,
    William> testing and unstable or can you have some or all of the
    William> three different flavors?  Your email seems to imply that
    William> you need something like Ubuntu or Mepis to use all three
    William> flavors at once.

First, you can ignore "stable": it's application-poor and you should
just use it to run your bank's network of ATM servers, or something
like that.

The answer is: in all cases (straight debian, ubuntu and mepis) it's
"or", which means one or the other or both, but "both" is less common.

You usually specify (in /etc/apt/sources.list) testing or unstable.
But you can do fine-tuning of apt to force some packages to be of
different versions.  I only recommend it for deep debian weenies.

What you do in alomst all of real life is you set something like this
in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free 

(together with other lines for non-us s/w and specialized things)

Then, every few days or so, depending on your impatience for new
versions) you do "apt-get update" and "apt-get -u dist-upgrade".

Once you are comfortable with resolving package conflicts you can move
up to using the "unstable" in sources.list, but everything else is the
same.