martin f krafft wrote:
I've tried debtakeover a couple of times. It doesn't look like it has been updated recently, which explains why got it to work with some older dists like RH8 or FC1.... but trying on FC3 or later... I've never had it give me a bootable system.also sprach Glenn Hocking <glenn@sitegeneral.com> [2007.07.05.0138 +0200]:I have a few remote Fedora systems that I want to replace with Debian. I have no physical access and the providers of these servers will not load Debian. Has anyone been successful in doing an remote online replacement of Fedora with Debian (any version).Check out debtakeover.
At one point, I resolved to update the script and, to get ready, I used VMWare (although you could use a system of your choice... VirtualBox or whatever) to make a FC6 image that I could make unlimited copies of. Then, I could try the debtakeover and, when it fails, I could probably access the hosed partition from another OS and figure out what went wrong. I didn't actually get any further than installing FC6 on a VM, but that's the easy way to diagnose it, I think.
Or... you can just do it by hand. The crucial pieces you need are chroot and debootstrap. Like someone mentioned before, you use chroot to change the root and setup the Debian base system there (using debootstrap to get all of the base pieces you need for a minimal Debian install). The part you'll need to be really careful of is reconfiguring the boot loader to load the right kernel from the right partition. Again, I'd set up a VM on your local machine that is setup just like the remote... and develop a sequence of commands (*write* them down, so that you can follow them, to the letter, when you do this on the remote) which let you login to the Fedora box, run the commands, reboot, and you're in a minimal Debian system wherefrom you can run apt-get. Once you're there, you're home free.
- Joe
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