Has anyone made a comparison of the various options for a smxi/Linux system? Kernel capabilities? Stability before and ofter upgrades? Interfaces? System tools? etc? Are there any links?

Although this can easily become a gnome v. kde flame war it would would be a useful tool for a newbie (to either Linux or smxi) trying to pick the best flavour.

I switched off Mepis when it went Ubuntu-based, and installed Kanotix. At one time I had problems upgrading and on IRC somebody (h2, slh?) recommended what is now smxi. One night my Kanotix suddenly and seamlessly turned into sidux before I could understand what that meant. I've only had a coupe o upgrade problems since.
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The first part of your question doesn't appear to have any meaning I can see, think about it more and try putting it into more concrete terms.

The 'seamless' upgrade from kanotix to sidux was the result of hundreds of hours of development from me and the sidux core guys, that was back when we worked as a 'team', closely, smxi was the only actual clean upgrade path for a while, even though today the sidux guys like to pretend that part of their history simply never existed.

Everyone involved in sidux worked hard to get that initial upgrade happening, but even with that, I've found that the old kanotix stuff had some hacks in it that simply will never be fully right, though for some users it's been fine, for my systems I had to do some manual hacking and bug hunting to get rid of some errors, but once gone, it's been fine.
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Not to dwell on this topic, but I thought it worth pointing out that (unfortunately and unsurprisingly) sidux seems to be having its second annual political meltdown. [link]
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Another power struggle?
Timing for the remaining users is probably OK on this due to the Squeeze freeze.

If it doesn't come back to life, there is always testing/sid and smxi.
Not too much of a learning curve. ;-)

Special thanks to h2 and the smxi team.


Marcus
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no need to wait/hope/pray for the sidux crew to get their act together

no problem running pure sid, maintained with smxi, on my two boxes - about nine months straight without a hitch

no learning curve whatsoever, plus i prefer gnome over kde4, and plus i get to think for myself and can ignore the sidux groupthink, fanboyism and dev worship

(and much thanks to h2 and the smxi team!)
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Is there a 'how to' to start a sid / kernel install from scratch or is the debian site the best source for doing this?
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This is not a how-to but a basic directional guide.

The IMO easiest way to get a sid install is to get a current testing "netboot installation" mini.iso from the debian installer page.
www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Use a wired network connection not wireless as WAP encryption seems to not work for an install.

Either pick an "expert install" or an "alternate desktop" and then an "expert install" from that. When you are picking the mirror pick one that has a sid repository, I usually use kernel.org.

As long as you are doing an expert install you will get the pick of installing stable, testing, or unstable sid on the next page. Pick sid and follow along with the installer and you should have a working install.

Reboot.

Then pull up a terminal as root and run:
cd /usr/local/bin && wget -Nc smxi.org/smxi && chmod +x smxi && smxi

From time to time the above installation route will not work due to changes in the installer and sid repository contents, but mostly it seems to work and problems get fixed fairly quickly. Check the errata on the installer page for current problems, although it will likely be problem free with the current freeze on testing.
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from wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ#Q.3AHowcanIinstallsid.28unstable.29withDebianInstaller.3F


basically, you download the testing businesscard CD image, then choose the "expert" install method, and then choose to install "unstable". in my experience, the non-gui expert installation option works fine, but i had problems using the gui version.
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