Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

James Miller wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Day Brown wrote:
> 
> > which is really buggy. Apt-get is really nice, but it wont getcha with
> > the debian servers down.
> >
> Not all the Debian servers are down, Day.  From what you said earlier, you
> were having trouble accessing Debian's web page (www.debian.org).  I have
> not had problems accessing it, but even if I had, that would not be
> material to whether I could access any of the main apt repositories or any
> of the hundreds of mirrors of those repositories.  The apt repositories
> are not webpages.  They are online storage sites.  They are typcially
> accessed via ftp, but can often be accessed by http as well, if someone
> wants.  Anyway, only some of the central Debian servers were affected by
> the recent hack: none of the mirrors or apt repositories were compromised,
> and they continue to operate normally.  
Yes, I found the list of mirrors. some didnt work. but Ibiblio came
up...
> I had absolutely no problems
> accessing any of the apt repositories listed in my sources.list file (and
> the main US apt mirror is included there).  I think the problem(s) you are
> having is/are probably related to your misunderstanding of how all these
> things work.  For example: if you have a sources.list file, maybe it
> points to a Corel apt repository.  Well, Corel is no longer in business,
> so I'd expect whatever apt repositories they may have had to be offline
> (probably permanently).  If you'd care to ask me or any other Debian user
> to help you understand better, I predict that the problem you're
> referencing could be resolved quite trivially.  And just as a final FYI,
> on a Debian list I monitor there has just recently been discussion
> prompted by some Corel user about how they could upgrade/update to a newer
> Debian.  The consensus seems to be that this is perfectly possible to do
> via apt-get (caveat:  don't try this if you have a fairly full Corel
> installation unless you have broadband.  It could tie up your phone line
> for a couple of days or more, if you try to use dialin).
And yes, I tried apt-get. and got a page full of errors, IIRC,
dependancies.
so then I tried the 'COREL UPGRADE' from the pull up menu after having
downloaded kannel.
I try to do my bit of testing new releases.
"dpkg: dependancy problems prevent configuration of kennel"
libc6 >=2.3.1-1
libmysqlclient10
libpam0g >=0.76
libssl0.9.7
libxml2 >=2.5.0-1
zlib1g....
and I think a few more.

But- when I logged on, nobody asked me what kernel I was starting from
(2.2.16)
I downloaded the binaries, not the source. I hate compliing. I'd rather
pile some other shit.
I have been here before, trying to upgrade the kernel.
It told me I needed GCC... Well I wasnt surprised, so I go to find the
latest, but then get *another* errormessage telling me that no, it
couldnt use a GCC after 2.95 and that 3.3... just would not do.
(standard PC rule of backwards compatability broken)
then it told me that I had the wrong edition of tgz... and on down the
garden path, like a true bureacracy, like going to the courthouse,
whatever papers you happen to have are not quite sufficient to do
anything more than waste enormous amounts of time and energy.

But after all... they are in the business of selling *new* distros, not
making it easy to upgrade what you already have. 

I wouldnt even bother, but the distro came with netscape 4.7, and that's
kinda long in the tooth as well as buggy. And when a site tole me that I
could click to upgrade, after doing the 12meg download or whatever,
*then* it tells me that needs a later kernel. 

You know, with DOS, I upgraded from 2 to COMPAQ DOS 3.31, then to DR-DOS
5, then to DR-DOS 7.03, with a few tries of ROMDOS and FREEDOS thrown
in, and *not once* did I havta repartition the drive and copy all of my
personal files, much less the collected .zip archives to a new drive
just to try the latest dos distro. Is there some problem with doing
Linux this way?