Slashdot Mirror

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?