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A Tool to Change Distributions?
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?
Wouldn't it be a whole lot more cost effective to install Windows and just use the Cygwin environment?
That way you get all the fun of Unix and all the applications and functionality of Windows on the same box without having to reboot.
C'mon. How goddamn stupid are you? Go buy a CD, or download and ISO and burn it. Reboot with said CD and install the new distro. Buy another HD, they are cheap, and install it on there, if you are worried about old applications and data. Don't waste slashdork's time, ... Christ ... you people are just goddamn stupid!
I have myself run into this, I once upon a time was a stong believer in the Stampede .86,.89 Distrobutiuon but then the developers disappeared in the weeds. The world advanced the distro didn't and so many components started going out of date that attempting to compile anything because nearly impossible. So I decided it was time for an upgrade, Stampede didn't have anything new and stable, .90 couldn't even boot correctly on two test machines, the patch they released didn't help, .91 has ben on the to be released track forever. I started looking for a new distro...I picked one(for reason of not starting the usual my distro rocks flame war, I will not reveal which), and went about installing it. I did this on a clean drive with the old one relocated on the chain so i could reference it for the old configs. This seemed to work out well, about 2 hours after the OS install completed I was back up and running normally. I found that once the mail spools, and home directories were moved, and the users recreated (I had trouble getting the users and groups to move via just copying the passwd and groups files as some documentain suggests, but I only have 5 users so that wasn't bad), things were in pretty good shape. A little cut and paste in the apache configs, samba configs, and sendmail configs and things were truely in the right. I think its certianly possible to build a utility to make the moves in the same way, although some standardization of things like directory structure, and program/library location would definately help.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I'm not really sure a distro swapping tool would work so hot, and you're probably not going to find anyone willing to write such a nightmare of a tool for free. :) I think a stardard format of sorts is the best way to go, but it's even that's gonna be a bear. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone would just run Debian. :)
/home and /usr/local and /usr/src directory, (plus whatever directories that you put specifically put files in) and then move the files over to your new install after you're up and running. I did the Redhat->Debian switch maybe 2 years ago and this is what I did with pretty good success. To tar up a directory do something like (as root):
/; tar zcvf home.tar.gz home
/; mv home home.old; tar zxvf home.tar.gz
:)
:) Btw, I haven't once regretted switching from Redhat to Debian, the apt-get functionality is simply a beautiful tool.
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.
If your friend installed redhat using diferent partitions for the diferent parts of the system he should have no problem. Tell debian to reformat /, /usr, /usr/local, /var but let /home and possibly some /data partitions intact. When you finnish installing debian your personal settings (in /home) and data (in /data) would still be there. Of course you're going to need to redo networking and hardware configs. I supose settling on a common /etc directory (and keeping that as well in the reinstall) would do the trick, but I don't see that as something that will happen. A tool to extract these configs from various distros and inserting them in another might be in order...
Pedro Côrte-Real.
Hey, totally off topic, but your nick is based of the main character of Weis & Hickman's Deathgate Cycle, right? Just checking my memory, I'm not quite sure.
/home, /var, etc. One cool thing for this hypothetical mover software could do would be to parse /etc/fstab and handle that for you when it installs the new distro.
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).
It's called "a knowledgable sysadmin".
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.