a few debian questions

[Geoff Shang]

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> 1. I want to build my own kernel. Can I just grab the standard sources
> from kernel.org, or do I need some dep package. If so, which one?

You can go the deb package route, but I've never done that.  I always just
suck down the kernel source and do what we all do.  Horses for courses, I
guess.

> 3. I installed using the woody floppies on linux-speakup.org, and the
> internet for the rest. I understand that there are newer distros since
> woody. Is there a way for me to upgrade my current install to the
> newest stable distro? If so, then how?

Woody is the newest stable release.  It's quite possible though that some
packages in Woody are newer than the ones you have.  Since you did a net
install for the bulk of your system, you should already have the FTP sites
set up in /etc/apt/sources.list.  So to make sure you have the newest
packages in the Woody release, do:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

> When I build my own kernel, I plan to build the network card support
> right into the kernel, and to use dhcpcd. I don't have a problem with
> looking around in /etc/init.d, and changing whatever I want
> manually. However, coming from slackware, which doesn't have such a
> strict package management system, I am afraid to do this, since I
> might break something in the package management system somewhere.

I've not made the move across, but I suggest installing the dhcp package
you want (I use dhcp-client, but there are some choices) and then seeing
what the system has done.  There's more than one way to make things work
and the packaging system will usually let you know if it's going to
overwrite something you've done.  The Debian config files are also fairly
liberally commented so it should be pretty easy to follow.

Geoff.