Re: install debian on a running rh box

["KORN Andras" <korn@chardonnay.math.bme.hu>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 05:53:01PM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:

> > is there a doc about installing debian on a running red hat box ?
> > i want to know which tools must i install to have apt/dpkg working so
> > that i can install base package ?
> Hmm, I'm thinking that if you have wget  you should be able to do it.
> It would be pretty cute if we could put together a redhat package for
> wget, I bet that would be pretty easy.  I'll file a wishlist for that.

Actually, I'm pretty certain wget packages for redhat already exist.

I've done such hackery twice so far: once I installed Debian 'bo' onto a
running RedHat 4.2 system; the other time I created a chroot on a SuSE
7.something box, unpacked the potato base2_2.tgz in it, then chrooted there
and installed 'normally'.

I dpkg-redirected start-stop-daemon and wrote a small script in its place
that displayed what arguments it had been called with, and offered a choice
of succeeding or failing without doing anything, or calling the real
start-stop-daemon with those arguments.

This was necessary to avoid trouble when postinst scripts attempted to
start/stop services.

I had to manually delete unconfigured.sh, set up /etc/hosts,
/etc/resolv.conf etc, but it worked in the end. Luckily, the chroot was on a
different physical device than the original root filesystem (and it resided
in the root of a filesystem itself), so I could boot into the chroot (with
lilo), mount the original root, and transfer the new system there after
deleting the old one (I could also have left it where it was and always
booted from the other device, but this was not desired.)

I would love to hear about even more painless ways of doing this, however.

Having statically linked versions of apt and dpkg, combined with perhaps
sash, would probably allow you to replace a running system with Debian (as
overwriting libraries would pose no threat). I haven't tried this since the
'bo' adventure outlined above, though. Has anyone else?

Andrew

-- 
            Andrew Korn (Korn Andras) <korn@chardonnay.math.bme.hu>
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