[clue-tech] Interesting sidux/smxi news

[David L. Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
> 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.

Based on this: http://manual.sidux.com/en/smxi-en.htm it either doesn't 
do some of what you suggest, or is too verbose about it so it isn't 
clear what you can expect.

> 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.

That's interesting.

> 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.

More interesting to me is the allusion here:

http://techpatterns.com/forums/about1091.html

that synaptic knows about auto and manual installs.

> 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.

How is that an smxi feature?  I do that already with aptitude, it's a 
matter of picking whether to install individual packages or meta-packages.

Dave