A week in Debian Stable leads me back to Debian Testing

Let me just put this out there, I really wanted to like Debian stable. Lord knows I wanted to curtail my desire for new software and just enjoy a nice stable box. But a week in Debian stable proved to be less than stable and I found myself reaching for the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replacing the stable lines with testing.

Some of the issues that spurred this move were VLC media player crashing out completely when loading up the icecast directory listings, and pidgin locking randomly. I guess the responsible thing to do would have been to report these bugs and await a fix, but I was fairly confident these issues were resolved in more current versions of the software and after upgrading to testing this has indeed proven to be true.

Before closing I want to make the following observations:

• Stable means mostly predictable rather than free of bugs.
• The Net-Install rocks – setting up the system from the ground up the way you want it is very cool.
• The debian wiki is awesome – full of great info.
• XFCE and Gnome for me are more usable than KDE in terms of workflow.
• If you encounter an issue of not being able to mount sd cards after installing from an sd card – see below for solve.

su -c ‘vim /etc/fstab’
This line below prevented me from mounting sd cards. no cdrom on netbook, commented it out and now everything detects fine.
#/dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

So a week in Debian stable leads me back to Debian testing. It wasn’t the end I expected when I embarked on this journey, but I guess moving out to a smaller town hasn’t completely changed my computing decisions. 🙂