Whew! I'm glad you got this sorted out. As for preventing this from happening again, you can't, but you can minimize the problems with various tools at your disposal. Remember the apt-get tricks I showed you? If you have a mixed system of stable/testing/unstable and you want to make it unstable, you would first edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and change the default release to unstable. Next you would open a console as root and type:
Code:
apt-get update
followed by:
Code:
apt-get upgrade
However, IMO, I think the better idea would be to test first and then commit instead:
Code:
apt-get -s -t unstable upgrade
followed by:
Code:
apt-get -t unstable upgrade
To get a more debian system as opposed to knoppix/debian, you would do this:
Code:
apt-get -s -t unstable dist-upgrade
That will remove some programs and add new ones to make it more debian specific but some knoppix components will remain. Debian unstable is, from what I understand, more stable than most distributions' stable entries. But it is experimental software and you must consider it as such. Think of it as beta software, and you will need to be aware that there will be some broken packages that can't resolve properly. Testing is supposedly beta too, but it's more polished as most of the bugs have been or is being worked out before it is released as stable. Personally, I think testing is more current than stable and just as stable as stable, but not as bleeding edge as unstable.