thomasmc wrote:I'd like to add the caveat that if you have proprietary drivers on your system, that could eventually break your system.
I lost my video recently because I wasn't paying attention and let some "mesa" updates through (they were only rated "3"), and I didn't realize it until later on when I rebooted, and all that came up was a blinking cursor. Fortunately, I keep a copy of the ATI install file where I can easily find it from the command line, as this isn't the first time updates have done that to me.
Another thing which may help is to add the dkms package. It's Synaptic description says
DKMS is a framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded
without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as
you upgrade kernels.
It has made updates to drivers and modules painless for me since I started with LMDE last September; mesa, xorg, etc. The same holds true when there are securtity updates to a kernel. When I added a second kernel I had to install the proprietary nvidia driver in it but since then when I update the nvidia driver in one kernel it is handled in the other. dkms will store original and previous versions of modules/drivers and make reverting less trouble if you need to do that.
when a working update comes I may think twice before using it.
