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I've always liked the way system administrators and LUG friends have praised the functioning of their Debian based Linux systems. Especially when it comes to upgrading.

In the past I've stayed away from Debian because it was a bit of a pain to get it installed on my machines. And, since I'm more of a business/desktop kind of guy, ease of installation and a lavish out-of-the-box feature set have kept me on SUSE Linux for a couple of years. Of course, doing that trades the upgrade capability of a simple apt-get on Debian for the headache of adding applications that could be hampered by RPM dependencies problems under SUSE. Oddly, I still like to do quick jobs via the command line.

So, my ears perked up when I heard that the live-CD Mepis Linux distribution was built on Debian. That meant that all the slick things that my friends raved about in Debian are rolled into Mepis. And Mepis is a breeze to install. Once Mepis is running from the CD you have the option of installing it on the hard drive, which took about 20 minutes on one of my prehistoric 266-MHz laptops.

My reasoning for combining the traditional Debian apt command with Mepis was speed and efficiency. Also, in the fine tradition of open source, I could choose to use the command line instead of the Kpackage or Mepis System Center package management screen. This is a good way to learn about Debian systems that builds confidence for new users right off the bat.

Let's see how apt works with Mepis.

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