A Tool to Change Distributions?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday October 3, 2001 @07:30AM from the nice-ideas-that-may-be-tough-to-implement dept.

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?

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Worst Question Ever by Anonymous Coward · 2001-10-03 07:49 · Score: 0, Troll

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!