Nix Bits

I found this article on installing Debian From Scratch fairly intresting. Lately I’ve been installing mepis as a Debian install for others. But for myself, I need something a bit more hands-on. The Debian install I have at home is getting really stale now so I am actually considering a re-install.

Lots of folks think a re-install might not be necessary; just apt-get upgrade to happiness. But, honestly, I’ve got a mess of old packages, configs, etc form having a nearly 4 year old desktop, unstable installation. If this box were a server with a stable-testing, it would be a different story. There are times when a clean install makes sense. And it would give me a chance to get re-aquainted with the “Debian way” and new tools they have built — just recently I discovered the rather handy modules-assistant for rebuilding nvidia-kernel and alsa-src on my 2.4-kernel unstable Debian box.

References

• http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/dfs/html/dfs.html
  – DFS documentation
• http://julien.danjou.info/article-apt-build.html
  – apt-build tutorial (translated from French). Gives (overly) fine-grained build customization ala Gentoo.