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Debian

A Tool to Change Distributions? 19

Posted by Cliff 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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A Tool to Change Distributions? More

A Tool to Change Distributions?

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  • I have run across this (Score:3, Informative)

    by haplo21112 ( 184264 ) <haplo@epithnaFREEBSD.com minus bsd> on Wednesday October 03, 2001 @04:01PM (#2385181) Homepage
    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 The world advanced the distro didn't and so many components started going out of date that attempting to compile anything because nearly impossible.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.
    • Do you think a HOWTO would be a better idea than a distro-swapping tool? I've done the same myself, out of frustration at the death of a fairly decent distro and an inability to update correctly. Might even be an easy task if you've got separate filesystems in use, except for distros which don't like /boot... Dang them!
    • 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.

      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 /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.

      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).
    • I don't regret a second that I spent messing about with the Stampede Linux distro because it taught me a hell of a lot about how everything works. Ok, so the actual fact is that everything was horribly broken and incomplete, but it worked out well for me.

      Stampede's goals at the start were good- a totally pentium-optimized distro- this at a time when pentium-optimization was virtually unheard of in distributions.

      graspee

  • My solution... (Score:3, Informative)

    by gid ( 5195 ) on Wednesday October 03, 2001 @07:13PM (#2386162) Homepage
    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.
    • This is similar to how I switched from RH to Progeny. I installed Progeny with a / and /boot partition (over the old ones) and didn't specify a /home partition. /etc was tarred and gzipped.

      Upon new boot, change /etc/fstab to point to the old /home (I think I may have had to do a chmod on the directories. Easy for a home system, likely nightmare for a corporate system)

      Unzip the /etc and copy the pertinent files.

      And yes, I also switched purely for apt-get.

    • I've been using Linux nearly exclusively since 1997 and when I upgraded my HD, I put my swap partition at the beginning of my extended partition (8 GB into the disk) followed by my /home directory. /root and partitions for backups and rarely used data go before the swap partition.
      I've got two 3Gb partitions and on 2 GB partition before my swap space. When I decided to switch to debian, I merely installed Debian on one of the backup partitions, and the two distros shared the same /home partition. (Caution: file ownership etc. is stored by UID, so you have to match up the UIDs between distros.) For a few months I kept Redhat as a safety blanket, just in case I couldn't get something working under Debian. I ended up reformatting the RH 6.2 /root partition for extra backup space.

      I agree whole-heartedly about apt-get. I started with RH 4.3 and followed RH to 6.2, then switched to Debian 2.2_rev2 for apt-get/dpkg (and Debian's rock-solid reputation). I absolutely love apt-get. Installation of packages is a snap, and no removal headaches like I've experienced w/ rpms. Microsoft is supposedly great at making things easy to use, but the don't ahve any tools that you can just tell "get me winamp" or "get me AIM" and have it install those programs. Usually I don't even need to bother with installation menus. Image WIndows software installation without those stupid wizards! Granted, you may have to go back and tweak things, but most Windoze users just blindly click on the installation defaults anyway!

      On a side note, I have recently discovered how amazing LaTeX is. My old MS Word Documents looked like crayon scribbles in comparrison. It's like using B&W film to give ordinary photographs that little touch. Ever notice how almost everything looks better in B&W? Same thing for LaTeX. It Just gives everything that little something special.

  • 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...
  • 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.

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