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?

Comments

I have run across this

[haplo21112]

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 The world advanced the distro didn't and so many components started going out of date that attempting to compile anything because nearly impossible.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.

My solution...

[gid]

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. :)

My personal solution is to tar up your /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):
cd /; tar zcvf home.tar.gz home
to extract (as root):
cd /; mv home home.old; tar zxvf home.tar.gz

(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. :) Btw, I haven't once regretted switching from Redhat to Debian, the apt-get functionality is simply a beautiful tool.