Converting Existing Systems From One Distro To Another? 17
Sam "Criswell" Hart asks: "I have been using Red Hat on my machines since RH4.2. The reasons were largely due to bandwidth issues and the fact that I could always get the latest RH ISOs for free. However, since 6.2 I have been disappointed with RH, and 7.0 with its not-quite compatible GCC would be very bad for my free-software projects. I have been thinking of switching to Caldera or possibly to Mandrake. However, I am spoiled by the fact that I can just pop in a new RH CD and upgrade my existing system quite painlessly. Because there are so many other RPM-based Linux distros out there, and they have update options, are there any (esp. Mandrake or Caldera) which can relatively easily update systems based on other distros? For example, anyone have any success or troubles trying to upgrade a RH6.2 system with Mandrake 7.2? Is it possible, or is there something significant blocking such a thing?" While updating a system with software intended for another distribution isn't necessarily good idea, are there utilities out there that can perform the necessary operations needed to convert an existing system from one flavor of Linux to another?
free ISOs (Score:1)
File system thoughts (Score:1)
I guess the question could also be, does everyone one use the same mount points? I have toyed with the idea of mounting \home on a different disk, so in theory I could hose the root \ and try different distributions.
Don't like the new gcc? (Score:1)
Wipe clean, it's not that hard to rebuild. (Score:1)
What's wrong with RH? (Score:4)
How, exactly, is it bad for your free software projects? Do you actually know what's incompatible about the gcc in RH7? Binaries compiled with RH7 won't work on earlier versions of RH -- just as RH6 binaries didn't work on RH5, and RH5 binaries didn't work on RH4. But the reverse is not true. You can run older binaries just fine on RH7. And if you want to compile stuff on RH7 that will work on older versions, just use kgcc -- it's exactly the same egcs-2.91.66 that was shipped with RH6. So what, exactly, is the problem? Or are you just listening to the ill-informed whining on slashdot?
Re:Various Distros (Score:4)
A well designed system will have /home, /usr/local and /opt on separate filesystems
anyway, so it's just a matter of mounting them in the appropriate
places after the upgrade. Of course, this doesn't help
newbies suckered into putting everything in one big filesystem
by the CorelLinux install (for example -- there are plenty of other
offenders).
Various Distros (Score:4)
Backup
Generate a list of installed packages. With an RPM distro this is easy: rpm -qa > rpmbackup.txt
Backup the database.
Install the new distro from scratch.
Restore from backups. I drop
Copy the appropriate lines from
Configure any software. This often means restoring a file into
Restore the database.
Install any software the new distro didn't. I now use SuSE, so this part is fairly short, TkPGP, OSS commercial, and CivCTP. I now shudder at the thought of moving to Red Hat, or anything other than Debian, due to the amount of software I'd have to install individually...
Re:What's wrong with RH? (Score:1)
If he's like me, that's probably what scares him.
RedHat - Debian (Score:2)
It's not really that hard.
Answer: Don't do it, really (Score:3)
There are really too many problems associated with incompatible distributions to list them all here, and it would only take you an afternoon to set up a fresh install and restore your settings (I've done it 3 times in two weeks with Mandrake 7.2, which I'd highly recommend among any other, except maybe FreeBSD.) I'm also curious as to when upgrading any distribution became painless, I've had nothing but problems on any system ranging from the brute-force method to the nicest of package management. Even if you're going to use the same distribution version as previously, you're most likely to clean up a LOT of crap just by reinstalling from scratch. Go for it!!
Converted from Redhat to Mandrake about two years (Score:2)
Re:Don't like the new gcc? (Score:1)
Re:What's wrong with RH? (Score:1)
Re:free ISOs (Score:2)
painless upgrade (Score:1)
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
(the reason i switched to debian from slack)
Re:Various Distros (Score:2)
Re:Converted from Redhat to Mandrake about two yea (Score:1)