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Depenguinator "Upgrades" Linux to BSD

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-just-creapy dept.

cperciva writes "Many systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection." Clever idea.

6 of 616 comments (clear)

  1. Similar tool for Debian by tuxzone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Looks like a great tool. Unfortunality for the daemons, I want to replace my dead rat (7.2) with a Debian branded penguin. I would love to do that upgrade online. Any tips or tools?
    Thanks!

  2. pff, old stuff by sweede · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This isnt new, I changed 3 of my dedicated servers (2 debian 1 redhat) to Gentoo using a doc thats almost 2 years old that was based of a "how to remote install BSD"

    you can do this with any system that lets you bootstrap the OS from the harddrive (i.e. gentoos stage tarballs).

    --
    I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
  3. Windows - Freenix by aking137 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've often wondered if this could be done with Windows - if one could make a (perhaps large) Windows executable that, when you double click on it, assimilates your system and turns it into a Linux box. (Which could in turn provide the depenguinators with lots more machines to work on.)

    Win9x should be more straight forward - you can boot a linux kernel directly from a real DOS prompt using loadlin (although this may not be necessary), and it's possible to have the whole root filesystem stored in one file on a FAT32 filesystem, so the .exe could create the root filesystem (maybe something like a base debian or gentoo install), put everything in place, change how the machine boots, and restart.

  4. Re:Do not use this unless you know what you're doi by sparkes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "upgrading" from one OS to another is never trivial.

    I would think that on most i386 systems running linux the first 40mb or so is /boot or swap.

    Swap is a simple case of swapoff then setting it up again in the freebsd setup (perhaps using the old /boot?)

    and /boot is going bye bye anyway.

    As a confirmed debian user (running it across multiple platforms) I wouldn't use this anyway and would suggest any user looking for a clean upgrade to a BSD from GNU/Linux would be better off backing up /home and other stuff that you want to survive the upgrade (/var/www perhaps) and nuking the whole thing using OpenBSD. If you are 'upgrading' from GNU/Linux to a BSD at least make it the safest variant ;-)

    --
    blog and junk
  5. Re:Now all we need is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Guys? Let's not keep lauding every new 20 lines of shell script and sophomoric disk duping tools as a new invention. And "making sure the first 40 Mbytes is not in use" is non-trivial. In most cases, it involves relocating the "/boot" partition. "/boot" is almost never necessary these days, you can put its contents on "/", but it's still awkward to do.

    Switching from one OS to another is not completely obvious to do at its best. I've written tools that do extremely similar things in Linux, although I stuffed the OS image into a swap space at the *END* of the disk, and completely automated the OS installation procedure to do a complete "burn to bare metal" and completely partition it as desired. Unfortunately, this guy's approach does not allow a graceful recovery if the middle step fails. If you use the Linux LILO tool, you can, by using "lilo -D" to set a default OS, but using "lilo -R" to set the next reboot to use the other OS for one time only.

    It's easy to do in the Linux world, because you can chroot to the new partition and run "grub-install" or "lilo" from there. It's tougher in the cross-platform world: getting it to correctly write an MBR is considerably more difficult. I normally solve it for Linux/Windows/Solaris/what-ever by using the Linux-based MBR generation tools, then if I really feel the need to flush the Linux partitions and blow away the MBR, use the other OS's native MBR tools while running that other OS.

    But the basic technique is at least 3 years old, hardly worthy of slashdotting.

  6. Re:Hmm... by dasunt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How long before it gets added to debian or gentoo as a package?

    "apt-get install freebsd" or "emerge freebsd".

    Debian is already flirting with demonic possession in different ways

    Ne'ermind the hopefully optimistic other project