On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Dinesh A. Joshi dinesh.a.joshi@gmail.com wrote:
Anyway, my point stands and it stands well. Lenny is a billion years behind what other distros are currently offering. It is Debian *stable*. I cant possible begin to stress the "STABLE" aspect enough.
True, Lenny is Debian stable, hence has older packages compared to other distros. They're about as old as RHEL packages would be. Why? because they're implemented on servers, and they need to be rock solid, not bleeding edge. And Debian stable pretty much defines rock solid.
No. They're not my personal experiences. They are general, known facts. There are several bugs open against the packages in Sid and thats the whole point of Sid. Its meant for developers / testers who are capable of fixing broken packages. It is NOT meant for end users. Lenny is for
In my 7 years of using Debian sid, I remember only 3 or 4 occasions when something was broken badly enough for me to actually take time out to fix it. Most of the times, fixes for such errors come out within 24 hours. Yes, it is Debian "unstable", but it really doesn't imply what you seem to think. With respect to stability I would actually go out on one leg and compare a Fedora/mandriva _release_ to Debian sid with respect to stability. In fact, Debian unstable seems more stable to me than the Fedora 10 release I've been using for some months now.
If you want real bleeding edge, something that would compare to, say, Fedora Rawhide, I ask you to try out Debian experimental. That's where you would find the absolute bleeding edge software and you can rest assured that whatever works on Mandriva/Fedora, etc will work there -- and, I'd wager, be more stable since Debians qa processes are much tighter when it comes to getting packages in from upstream.
Hence my comment to the OP that Sid/Lenny isn't the best choice when trying to get hardware working. Sid is meant for a different purpose and people often misunderstand it!
Again, most people misunderstand Sid -- you do too. It is about as stable as a release version of any other distribution.
I'm a Debian supporter but I'm a professional at the same time. I believe "Use whatever is best suited for the job". Is Lenny really suited for the OP's problem? I dont believe so. Why? because Lenny has packages which are OLD.
May be not Lenny, but Sid definitely would be worth the try.