Working with Debian Again

I'm taking another look at Debian, as I may need to run some software tied to Linux firewalling software not found on FreeBSD.

I took advantage of a few good articles, including Introduction to Debian Software Package Management, the Apt How-To, Apt-Pinning for Beginners, and Using APT with more than 2 sources. Following their advice I created an
/etc/apt/sources.list like this:

#Stable

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main non-free contrib

deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free



#Testing

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib

deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free



#Unstable

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib

deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free



#Security

deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

I created an /etc/apt/apt.conf file to address some memory problems I'd encountered earlier:

APT::Cache-Limit "8388608";

I then ran these commands to update my system, a Pentium 90 running Debian 3.0r2:

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

These updated my system to a certain state, but I then ran another command to go farther:

apt-get dist-upgrade

When I was done, I tried installing 'sudo' using apt-get:

oates:~# apt-get install sudo

Reading Package Lists... Done

Building Dependency Tree... Done

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  sudo

0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 146kB of archives.

After unpacking 365kB of additional disk space will be used.

Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org testing/main sudo 1.6.7p5-1 [146kB]

Fetched 146kB in 0s (158kB/s)

Selecting previously deselected package sudo.

(Reading database ... 8768 files and directories currently installed.)

Unpacking sudo (from .../sudo_1.6.7p5-1_i386.deb) ...

^TSetting up sudo (1.6.7p5-1) ...

No /etc/sudoers found... creating one for you.

This installed the version of sudo in the Debian testing distribution. You can see the appropriate package here.

Testing, also known as 'sarge,' is a middleground between stable (aka 'woody') and unstable (aka 'sid'). There are packages for each of those as well. The stable package offers sudo 1.6.6-1.1, while the unstable package, 1.6.7p5-1, matches that installed by testing.

I'll report more as I learn more about Debian.