sidux anyone?

[Collins Richey]

It looks like my religion (per one of us) is changing again , and the
new religion is Gaia, the earth mother.

I read a nice review at
http://www.linuxseekers.com/content/view/163/1/ as posted on Linux
Today, so I decided to sacrifice a free partition to the goddess.

Gaia is the 2007-03.1 variant of the sidux project, a distro based on
a somewhat stabilized Debian unstable (ie Sid) with KDE or fluxbox as
the desktop manager choices. The actual results are as stable as any
distro I've used recently.

The ISO you download is a livecd, and you select Install after booting
the cd. One quirk came up immediately. I couldn't figure out any way
to choose an empty partition for the installation. I had to back out
of the install and format the partition from the running livecd. After
that it was the standard questions about timezone, users, etc. and a
quick installation.

After reboot from a snazzy-looking grub screen, the system came up
without a hitch, and I have added most everything I need. There are a
few quirks:

1. The installer puts up an xorg.conf with 'nv' (the open service
driver for nVidia). This driver is too dumb to size the screen
properly, so stuff was hanging off the right edge. Problem fixed by
installing the nVidia driver.

2. Every Debian-based distro has a different method of installing the
nVidia drivers, and it took a little searching on the forum to locate
the sidux method. It downloads and builds and enables the nVidia
kernel module and xorg.conf without a hitch. No reboot is required.

   get-sidux-binary-gfx
   install-binary-gfx -a

3. In typical Debian fashion, Firefox is now Iceweasel.

4. I've installed mplayer and flash, and sites like movie trailers and
youtube work as expected.

5. In typical Debian fashion, the grub menu.lst automatically
configures every distro you have for booting. The boot stanzas now use
UUID for everything. And, of course, even IDE drives are now
/dev/sdxx.

6. Iceweasel was configured to use the German spellchecker. It took a
little digging to find the solution. (about:config and set the
spellchecker option to en_US).

7. visudo was set to use nano as the editor (ick!). The standard
method to fix is

    update-alternatives --config editor

8. Unlike the other Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, sidux installs the real
vim, not the crappy vim-tiny. kudos.

9. Printer support recognized and setup my Epson CX4200 without a
hitch. Of course, I always have to remember to install mtink for
checking the ink levels. Haven't tried the scanner yet, but I bet it
works, too.

In summary, this is a fantastic new (it's been around for a while
before Gaia) offering. The forum is quite good.

And you thought Debian had to be old and creaky!

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.