David Liontooth wrote: > I'd like to install Debian on an amd64 currently running SuSE. It > doesn't have a CD or floppy drive, so the simplest would be to install > from within the current installation. What can I do? http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/debtakeover/README I used this process just this last weekend on an i686 system to convert it to Debian. I was very much impressed by how well everything worked. The author must have spent a tremendous amount of time working through the details. Very impressive work. The script is written quite cleanly and is easy to follow through the internals. It is not perfect. But certainly close enough to finish the job by hand. In particular in my case the password file remained the old one and did not have all of the pseudo users needed for the new system such as postdrop and others. Also nothing is really done with respect to the kernel and the one from the previous system is left in place. The script was written to convert remote co-located servers. Before using this on a live production system you would want to have tried it and tested it thoroughly on an offline system close at hand. Only when you are convinced that it will do what you want should you commit to converting a remote system with this method. I have not tried this process for amd64. But if the system is a 64-bit amd64 system then I believe this should work. But if it is a 32-bit i686 system then the bootstrap process will not work. Or rather it will work to convert it to another i686 system. Remember that the kernel is left as is in this process. > Back in February I used John Goerzen's amd64_pure_test > <http://people.debian.org/%7Ejgoerzen/amd64_pure_test.tar.bz2> to > install into a chroot, which worked fine, but this partition is no > more. Is it possible to install from a mounted iso image, such as > sid-amd64-netboot.iso? > > The instructions in debian-amd64-howto.html for installing into a chroot > assume you're already running Debian. The only step that is interesting on non-debian systems is getting debootstrap or cdebootstrap. You will need to download the tar.gz file and unpack it manually and build everything up manually. After that you should be able to proceed the same regardless of system. You can get the tar.gz file from the debian.org servers. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/debootstrap Look near the bottom for the link which currently says [debootstrap_0.2.44.tar.gz]. Another resource that you might find useful is the following. It also documents how to build a system from a chroot. http://www.inittab.de/manuals/debootstrap.html Bob
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