tlug: debian

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric S Standlee <fwiw3980@example.com> writes:

    Eric> I have had enough with fighting RH.

I am not a RedHat fan.  But I wouldn't count on a move to Debian
solving any of your configuration problems.  I like (and recommend)
Debian because I think it's easier to hack, has better documentation,
and gives me more control over individual aspects of my system.

    Eric> what things I should tar to my dos partition to ease setup
    Eric> again once I have debian in.

If you have enough space, I would backup all of /etc, all of /home,
and all of /var.  Debian _should_ be well-behaved with respect to /var
(and you probably don't really care unless you leave mail in the spool
or use /var/www as your httpd DocumentRoot; I like to keep track of
wtmp and so on and other log files), almost certainly is safe for
/home, but everything in /etc is at risk.  The risk to /etc is not
huge, due to the fact that Debian scripts know how to edit those files
but will refuse to do so if they are not Debian distribution files; on
the other hand, you will have to do all reconfig by hand.  You'll also
have the problem that Debian puts its files in different places and
you could end up configuring the RedHat copy some day :-) then
wondering why the configuration didn't change.

I have never done this, myself (I have converted from RH to Debian and 
from Slackware to Debian, but in each case I started from scratch
except for /home).  I am just before nuking my TurboLinux system
though (no hpscanpbm RPM!) ;-) maybe I'll try it out to see what happens.

    Eric> Is there a moving checklist somewhere like you can get from
    Eric> the post office before you move?

In general, I think your best bet is to install the whole thing from
scratch, wiping pretty much everything but /home, /var/spool, and
/var/log, and then looking at the old Red Hat configs if something
doesn't work under your best guesses in the Debian config.  Print out
ones you're really desperate to have (ppp especially).

Oh, yeah, if you have a custom kernel save it, System.map, and
/usr/src/linux/,config.

The problem with the checklist idea is it would heavily depend (a) on
your specific list of installed packages and (b) small differences
between the distributions.  I would just tar up /etc, for sure, and
make sure any other human-generated data is backed up.

Definitely install the `alien' package (I think this is done by
default).  Mostly I find that Debian has everything that RH does, but
if you run into something you want that's the other way around,
`alien' does a creditable job of installing RPMs into a Debian system.

    Eric> Also, I think that you mentioned that there was a
    Eric> dependencies problem with Japanese programs under debian
    Eric> once.  Which version, do you remember?  I have a fairly
    Eric> recent version on cdrom...

As long as you're just using the main Debian distribution (where most
of the Japanese stuff now is), you're OK.  If you go into Debian-JP,
you're on your own.  In particular, Debian-JP used to have heavily
modified X stuff (linked with VFlib and freetype; with version
3.2.3.3f-18 or something like that), all of which depended on all the
other X stuff, and it was a massive pain to upgrade to the next
version of XFree86 for reasons I don't understand (3.3 > 3.2.3.3f as
far as I can tell...).

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