A Tool to Change Distributions? 19
beton asks: "We've all come to the point where we feel the need to change distros. A friend of mine has been a loyal Red Hat user for over 4 years now, but now he'd like to try Debian. He's trying to accomplish this with minimal effort so I was wondering if there are any tools around that allow to change from Red Hat to Debian without having to start from a 'clean' PC and reconfigure everything to fit your needs. Such a tool should e.g. reinstall all your programs and should try to configure them using your current config files.
I did some searching on Sourceforge and Freshmeat but I didn't find anything useful. Do any of you know such a tool or is the whole idea just impossible to accomplish?" Even limiting such a tool to the larger distributions out there, it would be a bear to implement such a tool and iron out all of the wrinkles. Of course, if all Linux distributions could agree on a file system standard, then such a tool may even be unnecessary, but I doubt that will happen in the near future. So how do you all weigh in on this issue? Would a distribution conversion tool be useful or would we all be better off with a file system standard that works across multiple distributions?
I have run across this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I have run across this (Score:3, Interesting)
[OT] Re:I have run across this (Score:1)
Uh... to help avoid getting modded as off-topic, yeah, LSB compliant systems would certainly help quite a bit. Fortunately, you know that on most Linux systems, and indeed on most Unix systems in general, you've got a
One nice idea I had a while back as far as copying/backing up the passwd/group files is using something like LDAP to handle it. I've had to do what you did a few times (upgrading the NIS server, for example), and it's a real PITA (especially when there's ~50 users and a bunch of groups, all of which are vital to the organizations functioning). Unfortunately, in the main, most software doesn't really deal with having passwords anyplace but in the usual spots. It really would be nice if there were a better seperation between system and "real user" accounts, but, alas...
I one time forgot about the mail spools when moving over. Thank god this was my home machine and not something which a bunch of people would would be out for blood for. Though I did feel pretty dumb (soon after I changed my procmail config to dump _everything_ into a file in my home directory).
Re:I have run across this (Score:1)
Stampede's goals at the start were good- a totally pentium-optimized distro- this at a time when pentium-optimization was virtually unheard of in distributions.
graspee
My solution... (Score:3, Informative)
My personal solution is to tar up your
cd
to extract (as root):
cd
(sorry if I just insulted your intelligence with those commands
Debian likes to store your prefs in it's database of knowledge and then create config files on the fly whenever you upgrade a package, so just copying over your config files for each application probably isn't going to help a whole lot and you'll have lots of headaches trying something like this.
Most of your user prefs should be in dot files (gimp prefs, icq login info, etc) in your home directory, so if you back that up you should hopefully be fine for the most part.
Hey, no one every said linux was easy.
Re:My solution... (Score:2)
Re:My solution... (Score:1)
I personally only kept /etc files that were hard to config/can't replace easily, like smb.cfg, my ssh key files, my httpd.conf (not in etc, but hey) oh and also /etc/my.cnf (mysql config file)
I love being able to have a barebones debian box with nothing but networking and then apt-get installing the essentials, such as gcc, XFree86, WindowMaker, mozilla, gentoo, etc That way I know exactly what's running, because I put it there. :)
Re:My solution... (Score:2)
Upon new boot, change
Unzip the
And yes, I also switched purely for apt-get.
Re:My solution... (Score:1)
I've got two 3Gb partitions and on 2 GB partition before my swap space. When I decided to switch to debian, I merely installed Debian on one of the backup partitions, and the two distros shared the same
I agree whole-heartedly about apt-get. I started with RH 4.3 and followed RH to 6.2, then switched to Debian 2.2_rev2 for apt-get/dpkg (and Debian's rock-solid reputation). I absolutely love apt-get. Installation of packages is a snap, and no removal headaches like I've experienced w/ rpms. Microsoft is supposedly great at making things easy to use, but the don't ahve any tools that you can just tell "get me winamp" or "get me AIM" and have it install those programs. Usually I don't even need to bother with installation menus. Image WIndows software installation without those stupid wizards! Granted, you may have to go back and tweak things, but most Windoze users just blindly click on the installation defaults anyway!
On a side note, I have recently discovered how amazing LaTeX is. My old MS Word Documents looked like crayon scribbles in comparrison. It's like using B&W film to give ordinary photographs that little touch. Ever notice how almost everything looks better in B&W? Same thing for LaTeX. It Just gives everything that little something special.
Simple enough (Score:1)
sure, such a tool exists (Score:2)
Seriously, changing distributions is non-trivial, and always will be. It's a shift to a whole new way of doing things. Computer-translation of human languages has come a long way, but there's no way a computer could translate a good novel, not with present technology and even in the future not without a lot of work. Switching distributions is a smaller problem, but it's still the same issue -- it requires too much *understanding* for current computer science.
Re:sure, such a tool exists (Score:2)