Depenguinator "Upgrades" Linux to BSD

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.

Comments

Similar tool for Debian

[tuxzone]

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!

pff, old stuff

[sweede]

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).

Windows - Freenix

[aking137]

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.

Re:Do not use this unless you know what you're doi

[sparkes]

"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 ;-)