apt-mess

Being totally new to Debian, this surely will sound funny to my future self, but still, I'm pretty confused by apt/Debian's package management.

So I want to go from stable to testing, which is easy right, it's all laid out in the docs: do an apt-setup noprobe to prepare for your install. Hm. Except that there is no apt-setup on my current system (which is Etch stable). Go look for such, with apt-cache search and dpkg -S and what not -- no luck. Then there's this Google-thing, that leads me to this nice page the content of which is a bit misleading but gives me a good kickstart. Turns out, all I have to do is replace my "stable" entries to "testing" in my source.lst file. Now, do I have to do an apt-get upgrade before my dist-upgrade or is it unnecessary. Official docs say I better do a genuine upgrade before the dist-upgrade, but hell, they even say I should use aptitude instead of apt-get and then I don't know a bit about the difference between the to.

Linux From Scratch -- Success!!

After nearly a month of fiddling with LFS I finally got it working! It's really amazing to finally see the prompt that I built. :)

This is where exactly the journey begins. But before going beyond there are some issues to cope with:

1. An 'iso-8859-1 invalid identified' error after login -- I hope this would not lead to too severe locale-related issues

2. Drives that were hdaX on my previous host system are now named sdaX in the LFS system -- this may have to do something with udev?

3. There is no working eth0 interface which is the most painful part. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I've compiled the kernel with make defconfig?

Before really starting to do BLFS, I will investigate these issues, which will be easy since I have a snapshot inside the chroot environment with the livecd.