[Sussex] Partitioning reshuffle + Possible Distro Change (maybe)?

[John D.]

Further to my previous post about having to change my partitioning
scheme, it occurred to me that it might be a good opportunity to have
another "go" at something Debian based.

Things will have to be changed partition wise, because of my mp3
partition not being visible to my XP install (it seems that this is
because my fourth primary partition is a "linux extended" rather than
something that XP can see).

So, with that in mind, I think that if I just changed the fourth
partition, it'd probably wipe out my /root, /home and /mnt/mp3
partitions, which are all logical extensions within the /dev/hda4
extended.

If thats what is likely to happen, I thought that it would be an idea to
put something debian based on the system as a change.

My main issue, would be that it doesn't matter how many times I've
tried, I can't get used to gnome, so that would take Ubuntu out of the
equation. I understand that there is a KDE version of Ubuntu available
(Kubuntu ???), but having not had any experience of it, I'd be doubtful
of my abilities to manage it in the short term.

So, I'm thinking along the lines of installing Knoppix to the hard
drive, and then changing the apt-sources list to reflect "proper" debian
sources. Which should allow me to benefit from the excellent hardware
detection/auto configuration, while all the updates coming from the
debian sources.

I understand that Knoppix is a bit of a mongrel mix of debian testing
and unstable, so is that likely to be a major issue i.e. changing the
apt-sources so that it can see both testing and unstable causing
problems with upgrades and installs ??

In any event, I can always just re-install the gentoo, but think that it
might be good for the learning to have another crack at debian - though
not "proper" debian, given how rubbish I am when it comes to doing
things CLI/manually.

regards

John D.