[CS-FSLUG] Debian

[N. Thompson]

With the event of reinstalling everything I've been trying out several different distributions, most of the Red Hat based ones have turned to being mostly commercial with the exception of SUSE which has been more Free since Novell purchased the company.

I've recently been trying out debian based distributions, I'm sure you all know how I feel about those (they are not very user friendly) however I've found Mepis to be fairly good and its been a while since I've used any Debian based distro, not to mention the only recent experience I've had with it was on dad's laptop and that had only required packages installed. I've gotten MEPIS installed without any trouble, the problem however came when I tried to update it, the first time I just used "apt-get update" and then "apt-get upgrade" and answered (possibly incorectly) all the prompts that came up durring the installation process, I wound up losing support for all but my graphics card because all the kernel modules went missing. The second time I forcefully updated KDE first with "apt-get update" "apt-get install kde" and then I updated everythign else with "apt-get dist-upgrade -y". The problem with the later was not the kernel, in fact it booted up perfectly but because the KDE setu

I'm wondering whether some of you debian users out there would mind telling me what variant of Debian you are running, how you update your distribution (do you somehow manage to avoid all those questions in apt-get upgrade without the -y flag?) and what tool(s) you use to configure your system and maintain a firewall.