Hi Francky, Hi Malaire:
I invested today the sum of ten euros for a RealTech Ethernet controller, so that I am now able to contact this forum from my pivot_root install. Previous card (Davicom) was seen, though not put to work. RealTech makes even a faster Debian booting of Etch. With Davicom there was a long trial-and-error series before contact was established.

When you say "copy your Etch home into sda6 /home/francesco (knoppix-HD) you mean the filesystems existing in my Etch /home/francesco (not the whole /francesco directory in block) Correct?
Further, because wine is installen on knoppix, I should skip copying my installation of wine (present in Etch /home/francesco) into sda6 /home/francesco. Should knoppix wine not work, I should have to copy my installation (unfortunately not recorded which native dll were used: without them I was unable to install the database, although it may well be that now wine has newer dll that work).

If I would be asked about a single suggestion for unix-type environments, I would say: make a unix-native strong free-form database. In scanning the literature, learning, and taking notices, we can not use relational fully structured databases (for a number of valid reasons that I am not going to bother you with now). However, the free-form database should perform Boolean search, and very rapidly so, and should also allow to mark text so that it becomes a field. And should also allow aritmetic search: if you ask me which sponges (or a class, order or species, etc, of them) have been fished in between 20 and 40 meters depth, I can tell you in seconds through my database running on wine.

Cheers
francesco