[conspire] Preparing dual-boot system

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com):

> You are one flipping superb source of useful information, Rick. 

Yr. welcome, sir.

I've noticed, by the way, that I'm (again) behind the news on software
for writeable optical discs (CDRs and DVDs) for Linux, because there are
now _three_ compatible open source kits of command-line tools, rather
than two:

cdrtools:  Schilling's original bundle; includes cdrecord.
cdrkit:    The Debian fork; includes wodim.
libburnia:  Newest alternative, based on libburn; includes cdrskin.

("libburnia"?  "wodim"?  Somebody needs to help these guys with their
marketing.)

Essentially, Schilling's command-line interface has now become a
commodity standard shared among all three, such that you can use any of
them with any of the standard graphical front-end tools originally
designed for Schilling's cdrtools/cdrecord software.

Alongside those three is the dvd+rw-tools kit, including the growisofs
tool -- but those depart from Schilling's command-line standard, and are
also DVD-only.  I notice that, in general, though, the categories of CDR
and DVD authoring software have essentially (largely) merged, and I
really should combine what I have on the Web concerning those two subjects.


> In particular, I didn't know all those flavors/types of virtualization,
> Also, I'm not up on power supplies. I'm leaning towards making my next
> machine a Micro-ATX one, and one of the reasons I didn't pick up one of
> the 300 Watt Antec ones on sale for $30.00 at Fry's this weekend was be-
> cause I thought that 300 Watts struck me as being too thin for safety's
> (reliability's) sake.

Yes and no.  Remember, we're talking in "hirohama"'s case about an
eMachines box, all of which in my experience are physically small, hence
deliberately not expandable to (e.g.) hold multiple hard drives, have
few slots, and usually have a single relatively low-power-draw CPU.  The
real question is whether the alleged 270W Taiwanese no-name-you-know-of
PSU _really_ delivers the promised wattage -- whether it is a solid and
reliable 270 watts.  Cheap PSUs often simply cannot be trusted to be
(even) as powerful as the label claims, and I'm inclined by past
experience to believe, in that area, _only_ the labels of Antec, Cooler
Master, Enermax, PC Power & Cooling, and Sparkle/SPI PSUs.

(There may very well be _other_ brands that are reliable.  I list above
the ones that have Worked for Me.<tm>)

With one of the innumerable others, it might claim to be a kilowatt
power supply, and _still_ overstress trying to deliver 200W to
"hirohama"'s eMachines system and fry something.

> I switched to Slackware, as it was said to be the most UNIX-like Linux
> distribution.

That's why _many_ of us used and loved Slackware.

> I finally ended up switching to Debian because I found no clean way in
> certain instances in Slackware, other than manual compilation from
> source, to add applications or libraries that weren't part of the dis-
> tribution.

And that's why many of us ex-Slackware users ended up on Debian.  ;->