Corel to Debian micro-howto

[Aaron Maxwell <amaxwell@phy.ucsf.edu>]

Someone asked, so here's how I transmuted my version of CorelOS to
more or less "pure" debian.  Though this worked for me, it might be a
good idea to read any comments made on this post before doing this,
since IANAG (i am not a guru)

1.  Establish a net connection, if it's not already up.  (i.e., so you
    can ftp)
2.  If you're at not at the command line, go there.  Log out of the
    window manager, and press Ctrl-Alt-F2; you should go from the KDE
    login screen to a command line login prompt.  Log in as root.
3.  Remove all packages with the string "corel" in them.  You can get
    a list of these by issuing the command: [1]
      dpkg --get-selection | grep corel
    You'll get two columns; the names of the packages you want to
    remove will be in the left column.  Remove them with the following
    command, as root:
      apt-get remove pkg1 pkg2 ...
    where the pkgN's are the names of what you're removing.        
4.  Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to where the new packages are
    located.  If you're not sure, I recommend commmenting out all the
    lines in there (put a '#' as the first char of the line), then add
    this line:
      deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian frozen main contrib non-free
    This will upgrade your system to potato, Debian's 'frozen'
    release.  CorelOS is based on slink, Debian's 'stable' release.
    If you'd rather update to the latest version of slink, replace the
    word 'frozen' with 'stable' in the line above.  You can then
    upgrade to frozen from there if you like.  I just went straight to
    frozen with no problems, but ymmv.
5.  As root type:
      apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
    Your quasi-debian system will start downloading stuff and asking
    you questions as it installs and configures packages.  It may have
    to download a lot of stuff, especially if you're upgrading to
    frozen.
6.  KDE is now gone (CorelOS comes with a Corelized version of KDE,
    which you removed a few steps ago).  In its stead, I installed
    gnome.  [1] Install the necessary gnome stuff with this command:
      apt-get install gdm gnome-bin gnome-panel gnome-panel-data
              gnome-core 
    (that's one long line).  

That should be it.  'gdm' is the name of the program that provides the
nice graphical login.  If it doesn't automatically start, start it by
typing as root
  /etc/init.d/gdm start

[1] I don't know how to install the non-Corel KDE; if
    you want that instead, please search the list archives.
    (http://lists.debian.org/#search -- just search the debian-user
    list, ignore the 1.4e12 other lists)