Re: Easy way to migrate a Slackware system to debian?
On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 08:14:39AM +0700, Oki DZ wrote:
> Bruno Boettcher wrote:
> > I have a running slackware system on a computer which lacks a CD.... so since
> > this is a running linux system i figure that it should be possible to migrate
> > it towards debian.... is there somewhere a help about this? would it be enough
> > to install apt?
>
> Of course, it will always be possible to migrate to Debian, and the way
> is called: install from scratch.
>
> All right, maybe this doesn't help... but I don't think that there's a
> simple way (install Debian and you preserve everything; apps, your
> personal files, your system's settings in /etc) to do it.
You're right that it isn't simple--at least not seamless--but it's
certainly possible. My system was originally Slackware, and I've
gradually "Debianized" it over the course of a year or two. I'm
actually amazed by how few problems I came across in doing that.
(I'm sure it was in some part just dumb-luck, but hey.)
So here are some tips for Bruno (sorry, I missed the original
message)--I hope others will add anything important that I miss.
You'll first need to make sure you have a working glibc2.x (libc6)
installed. I think Slackware now does have this as a non-default
library--if not there's an excellent HOWTO out there somewhere on
making the upgrade--it should be at the official LDP sites by now.
The next thing you'll want to do is to install the dpkg package.
(dpkg and its helper programs are the "back-end" of all the other
packaging tools like apt, gnome-apt, and dselect.) Debian packages
are currently "ar" archives that contain (among other things) a file
called data.tar.gz that has the bulk of what gets installed. So get
the dpkg .deb from
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/base/dpkg_1.4.0.35.deb
and extract it from the root directory:
cd /; ar -pf dpkg_1.4.0.35.deb data.tar.gz |tar -xzv
>From there you can go on to install apt--make sure you have
libstdc++2.9 installed, get apt from the "admin" rather than "base"
directory of the above link, then do a:
dpkg --install --force-depends apt_0.3.10slink11.deb
After that, make sure a line like this:
deb http://ftp1.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
is in your /etc/apt/sources.list, download Debianized C libraries to
/var/cache/apt/archive/ like so:
apt-get update; apt-get -d install libc5 libc6
And for the grand finally (and this *could* possibly screw your
system, I can't make guarantees here):
dpkg --install --force-depends /var/cache/apt/archive/libc5*.deb
dpkg --install --force-depends /var/cache/apt/archive/libc6*.deb
>From here on, you should be able to install any debian package with
just "apt-get install packagename". You want to be very careful
about this at first, and lots of little things will go wrong, but it
should keep getting easier as you go.
Even the above actually won't go as smoothly as I've made it out to
be, so feel free to email me about problems you encounter if you
decide to take the plunge.
HTH,
-Kevin
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