[BRLTTY] friendly installs

[Jason White]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 10:12:58PM -0800, Hurst, Cody wrote:
> how do I do this? and what about fedora?

You do a clean install of Debian Etch, or alternatively you can download an
installation image of Debian Testing.

Once it's basically installed, you edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change the
distribution listed in each of the configuration lines from stable to testing
(or unstable if you really want the latest - not necessarily reliable -
packages).

After that, you run
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
and answer any questions asked along the way.

Fedora is a good and well maintained distribution, but it has a couple of
particularly relevant disadvantages:

1. The collection of packages is much smaller than in Debian. Moreover,
third-party RPM packages are reputedly often not maintained at the same level
of quality as those in the core distribution. With Debian, the package quality
is generally at a high standard, due to the Debian packaging policies and
quality assurance procedures.

2. Live upgrades of Fedora are not officially supported - that is, you have to
boot an installation image and re-install when you want to upgrade, whereas
with Debian you can just run
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
to upgrade the distribution. BRLTTY isn't yet included on Fedora installation
disks by default.

If most of the software you need is in the Fedora distribution itself (rather
than in third-party packages), then it should work well, except for the
upgrade issue noted above. It is, as I pointed out, well maintained by
competent developers.

As to why they don't make sure that live upgrades with Yum always work from
one Fedora release to the next, I don't know.