Migrating a running distro to Debian ==================================== Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009 Guillem Jover Distributed subject to the GNU General Public License, version 2. Introduction ------------ This started as a document to help migrating a colo server. So it has been used in the real world. The previous content that could be found here, was non functional, only some initial notes I took when doing the process by hand. It has been converted since into a proper script. One thing that must be understood is that the script is not going to convert the whole system to Debian, it will install a clean base system keeping some configurations, but will not map all previous installed programs to the Debian counterparts. It should preserve user data and backups of old system configuration, though. The new system is a clean Debian system, it's not a chroot, and no traces from the old distro will be kept around, but backups. The final intention is to create a wide framework to convert anything to Debian. The program is named debtakeover. Implementation -------------- Currently the script is in beta testing stage, be warned. It has been tested on RedHat, SuSE and Gentoo. It has some provisions now to be extended to any GNU/Linux distribution. Next step will be to do cross-installs from for example a FreeBSD to a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or a Debian GNU/Linux system. Latest released code can be found at: Latest development code can be found at: You will need deboostrap, that can be found on: Usage ----- Build debootstrap, and use "make install" to place it in the proper directories and make sure the main script can be found in the PATH, otherwise that will be checked by debtakeover. Place debtakeover in any excluded directory (/root) and run it from there. Take a look at debtakeover's --help option. By default it installs a stable suite (currently 'etch'), and uses the colo profile.