[conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition & distribution choice?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting David E. Fox (dfox at m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com):

> How is the 3D acceleration? Have you tested anything like beryl or
> compiz (they are not on the sidux distribution CD, but Knoppix has
> them.) 

Finding these things packaged for Sidux / Debian-unstable doesn't
actually take much looking, e.g.,
http://www.sidux.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-618-highlight-beryl.html

> I take it that all that comes with the installation CD is the
> non-proprietary driver, and you might need the proprietary one.

_If_ one can't get open source 3D going, on one's hardware.  ;->
(Not everyone has bought into the trap of relying on Nvidia, etc.
As a reminder, however, I have no experience, as I don't have recent
enough hardware, and regard 3D as mostly just a curiosity, anyway.)

> But with Xen being in the offing (as well as kernel support for HW
> virtualization) one wonders why you couldn't run a i386 program inside
> of an amd64 kernel (I suppose you would just boot the other root
> partition as a virtual task).

It's actually easier to just have i386 support libs present -- or, for
recalcitrant proprietary apps, running them in chroots.  And that's
certainly one heck of a lot faster and less RAM-chewing.


> If your sources list tracks 'testing', you always are using 'testing'.
> Caveat though if you do that when Etch becoms stable - at least for a
> while (anyone else had issues like that during transitions? they seem
> to come up now and again on debian-user).

Very nervous / skittish people who've been tracking "testing" might
retreat onto stable=etch at the time of release, rather than following 
the "testing" symlink automatically onto testing=lenny at the time of
etch release.  I've never bothered to do that, in the past, and never
regretted just letting the system work as intended.

[Sidux:]

> This has also been a concern of mine. There are a lot of 'small'
> distros (small in the number of users/developers, not in the sense
> of 'small' footprint) that seemt to just coem and go, cause a flurry
> of attention, and then they're gone. Many don't (unless they're a
> fork of debian) have a clear upgrade path.

One nice thing about Sidux is very limited downside risk if the Sidux
developers ever hang up their hats:  You have a fully functional "sid"
system.

You can at that point just keep following pure "sid" or converge onto
some other Debian-compatible offshoot, just by changing a couple of
lines in /etc/apt/sources.list.