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I was thinking about installing LMDE because I want a rolling release I have never use Debian so I don't know how close it is to the Ubuntu bases Mint edition. I was wondering if all the packages from the Ubuntu based system will install and how difficult it is.

Electroman6913 wrote:I was thinking about installing LMDE because I want a rolling release I have never use Debian so I don't know how close it is to the Ubuntu bases Mint edition. I was wondering if all the packages from the Ubuntu based system will install and how difficult it is.

If you want to 'play' with Debian based distros such as LMDE or other Debian based distros, or even straight Debian, there is one important thing from my learning through playing with many of them plus reading lots of breakages, you should consider Debian based and ubuntu based as 'totally different distro'.

The reason is Debian based has lots of update and need lots more time to maintain.
Upgrade often leads of breakages.
Read the sticky thread by zerozero http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=67502

How difficult is installation?
LMDE does have a bit more demanding on partitioning, from a stand point of a Linux newbie.
However if one can handle manual partitioning before installation, then to me, there is no difference in installation process.

Agree with much of what wayne already said. Personally haven't used Mint debian based stuff myself. Just going by what's been said in these forums. Which spend wayyyy too much time messing around in them. So have seen a lot said about lmde.

Would think if you're new to linux. You'd be mucho better off avoiding lmde until you get more familiar. Mint even puts a warning on the download page for Mint debian stuff. More or less telling a person they need to 1/2 know what they're doing with linux already and expect difficulties to come up.

Don't think for newbish folks esp lmde is the way to start out. No law saying you can't put it on a testing partition and play with it. But wouldn't think it'd be a good idea to rely on it as your main OS for everyday use. If you feel like it ... see no reason someone couldn't put it onto it's own partition and give it a try. Though thinking common sense would be a good idea. Such as not letting lmde's bootloader take over the boot process n mbr of your hard drive. etc.

Something you should be able to select during the install process. At least would assume Mint HQ included that option in the installer for lmde.

Here's another opinion on the subject for ya.

Another consideration with respect to the "breakage" issue. The default LMDE points to the "testing" repositories. These tend to be pretty dynamic. If you change to "squeeze" you should see more stability (/etc/apt/sources.list ).

I've switched back to "testing" because I was missing out on too many app upgrades that I use on a regular basis. I also use a rollback capability if an upgrade / update series goes wrong (partition level backups before and after the update /upgrades ).

-DataMan

DataMan wrote:Another consideration with respect to the "breakage" issue. The default LMDE points to the "testing" repositories. These tend to be pretty dynamic. If you change to "squeeze" you should see more stability (/etc/apt/sources.list ).

I've switched back to "testing" because I was missing out on too many app upgrades that I use on a regular basis. I also use a rollback capability if an upgrade / update series goes wrong (partition level backups before and after the update /upgrades ).

-DataMan

wow do you switch to testing and wow do you know what version you have.

I think you posted a question wow = how ??

If so, Mint Debian should be installed with the testing repositories as the default. As I said in the posting, if you want more stability change "testing" -> "squeze" in /etc/apt/sources.list .

-DataMan

Mint Debian combines the advantages of debian and ubuntu.
It's lighter,faster and more responsive than ubuntu, but not so hard to configure as debian.

I installed LMDE a while back with no problems, before that I tried Mint 10 and it refused to recognize the partitions on my hard drive. I spent most of last week trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 but that wouldn't recognize any partitions either so now I am happily back to LMDE and had very little problem with it.