On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 08:11:16PM +1100, Mark Trickett wrote:
Aha, another piece of using apt-get. It is brilliant, but also a very steep learning curve. It would be very good to have a good cheat sheet in a printable form.
$ apt-get --help apt 1.8.0~rc3 (amd64) Usage: apt-get [options] command apt-get [options] install|remove pkg1 [pkg2 ...] apt-get [options] source pkg1 [pkg2 ...] apt-get is a command line interface for retrieval of packages and information about them from authenticated sources and for installation, upgrade and removal of packages together with their dependencies. Most used commands: update - Retrieve new lists of packages upgrade - Perform an upgrade install - Install new packages (pkg is libc6 not libc6.deb) reinstall - Reinstall packages (pkg is libc6 not libc6.deb) remove - Remove packages purge - Remove packages and config files autoremove - Remove automatically all unused packages dist-upgrade - Distribution upgrade, see apt-get(8) dselect-upgrade - Follow dselect selections build-dep - Configure build-dependencies for source packages clean - Erase downloaded archive files autoclean - Erase old downloaded archive files check - Verify that there are no broken dependencies source - Download source archives download - Download the binary package into the current directory changelog - Download and display the changelog for the given package See apt-get(8) for more information about the available commands. Configuration options and syntax is detailed in apt.conf(5). Information about how to configure sources can be found in sources.list(5). Package and version choices can be expressed via apt_preferences(5). Security details are available in apt-secure(8). This APT has Super Cow Powers.
I am now considering two installs on the computer, one stable, the other sid, and dual booting to get the scanning. As there is one normal user, I should be able to set up a shared home partition and the one user in each install sharing the one home directory structure. That way, I still have a usable system for most things, but can get at the stuff in sid at need.
That seems overly complicated but it should work. the only thing to be wary of is to make sure that your user has the same UID and GID on both systems (which should be the default, as debian makes users with UIDs starting from 1000) You probably don't even need a separate /home partition. You could just mount the stable system (e.g. as /stable) and symlink /home/mark on the sid system to /stable/home/mark. Personally, I'd just upgrade to sid. I've never considered the stable release to be anything special, its main use to me is providing an installer to build new systems with (that then get immediately upgraded to sid). I'm biased, though: I've been using debian unstable since the 90s. BTW, the only reason why "unstable" is called "unstable" is because a CD distributor in 1994 or 1995 jumped the gun and released a "Debian 1.0" CD before it was ready. The name was deliberately chosen to be scary enough to discourage anyone from doing the same thing again...it doesn't mean that it's flaky or crash-prone. IMO, obsessing over the "stable" release of debian misses one of the best and most important features of debian - it's a constantly updating distribution with new and updated stuff every day. This occasionally (rarely) causes problems but a) as long as you're careful and don't let apt uninstall stuff you don't want it to, it's no big deal and b) those problems are almost always easily fixed....back in the 90s there were occasionally some huge problems, but not since the transition from libc5 to libc6 in 1998 (which required a very precise and complicated upgrade procedure. I wrote a script called autoup.sh to completely automate the procedure, taking into account the vagaries and bugs reported by many people at the time. This was before apt existed, which automates the kind of dependency resolution I had to do in my script: my script was a one-off hard-coded hack, while apt analyses the deps etc and arrives at a solution) The biggest problem with sid these days is the constant churn of KDE and Qt packages (and, to a lesser extent, gnome). I've found that the best way to avoid problems there is to use 'apt-mark' to hold the few KDE & Qt apps I use (okular, qdfview, calibre) so that they don't get auto-uninstalled due to versioned dependencies (doing that causes the KDE and/or Qt packages to not get upgraded if that would cause the help packages to be removed). craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>