[clue-tech] Interesting sidux/smxi news

[Collins Richey]

Any of you that have tried Sidux (a KDE distro based on Debian sid
with locally developed kernels and other extras) have probably used
the smxi maintenance utility. Smxi (and a few related utilities)
provides a standard, automatic way of performing dist-upgrades, kernel
upgrades, holding back packages with nasty dependency chains, relinki
proprietary video (and other) modules, cleanup crud, etc.

The smxi developer has now severed any ties with Sidux development and
is continuing to develop  smxi as a general purpose utility for any
Debian or Debian-derived distro. The really interesting news
(especially for Dave Anselmi who is a known fan of aptitude)  is that
you now have a choice to maintain your system with smxi + aptitude or
with smxi + apt-get.

The Sidux developers are strongly opposed to aptitude (apparently
based on bad experiences with a less capable aptitude release from
several years ago), but recent experimentation with smxi + aptitude
have shown that there are few if any problems even on Sidux.

One side benefit of using smxi with a Debian stable, testing, or sid
variant is that you can install a minimal Debian with no X support
(using the "business card" iso) then use smxi to
install a much less bloated kde, gnome, xfce, etc. desktop with only
the desktop packages that most people really need.

For those of you who have an interest in smxi, the forum for news,
shared experiences, bugs, etc. is at
http://techpatterns.com/forums/forum-33.html. Scroll to the bottom of
the forum groupings for smixi topics.

Enjoy.

-- 
Collins Richey
 If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
 of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.