Hi,
I've installed Debian 4.0. Now, i want to install new packages and update the system, and here i'm lost. How do i manage my repos in debian? Where do i get all the mirrors? Basicaly, i'm looking for a substitution for an urpmi and its mirrors.

Thanks.

Check this 1st... (do read it else the names will be confusing)
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Next
http://www.debian.org/mirror/list

Usually closer is better...

For me my primary source is either

deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free
or
my ISP actually prvides a full mirror I get 22Mbit dloads from so I use that...

After this is some stuff like
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ sid main

This contains mplayer etc. and codecs not on official sites....
Finally
www.apt-get.org
has thousands of unofficial sites....

you add them to
/etc/apt/sources.list
in the format above....
you can add them through synaptic etc. but its usually easier to just edit the file directly
after editing it
apt-get update

Thanks !

New one: every time i reboot, i can't connect to the internet. I have to deactivate and then activate back my NIC. That is strange, because right after the install i had a working connection.

Any ideas?

Have you set it up in /etc/network/interfaces?

no...

how should i do that?

An example from one of my machines:
How did you configure it otherwise?

Edit: for dhcp I think it is:but I'm not sure

So i should add "auto eth0" ?

I have

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Thank you, it does the trick.

Can i mix Sid packages with stabe ones? I mean, if i want to install the newest version of certain program, can i install it from sid mirror?

Can i chose a different update mirror ?

You could, but then you might get into a bit of a dependency-nightmare. I'd choose between stable/testing/unstable, however new you want to go, and ensure that you don't mix and match, but be fully of one variant.

Yup, first find the mirror you want to connect to, you can then edit /etc/apt/sources.list and edit each url for the mirror you found. I don't know of any other way to do this, although I'm sure there must be a better way. I'm using Ubuntu on one of my machines and it's using a polish mirror by default from install. No idea how it figured it out but it did. You can probably get a list of mirrors from Debian's website.

http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/

this link is for the download mirrors, but I expect they'll also have updates on there too than just iso's. I think I just used the beginning url for a polish mirror when I was using Debian on my laptop, the rest of the url after the domain name would remain the same.

I agree with Ian. I would 'not' recommend mixing them... I would suggest using the backports for more up to date packages.

Debian Backports

Thanks for that!

Regarding updates: the current update entry in my sources.list begins with security.debyan and contains "etch/updates" string. What does it mean?
Can i apply that string to any mirror and thus it'll be my upgrade source?

Also, what is the right way to install KDE on debian?

P.S. If you can post links to good Debian sites for newbies it would be great...

In a terminal as root doafter it's installed, press Ctrl+Alt+backspace and when gdm comes up click on sessions and select KDE.

Documentation links:

debian.org/doc
Debian Wiki
debiantutorials.org