Kent West wrote:
Mark Shuttleworth showed me a nifty trick with aptitude when doing a dist-upgrade. From memory, in interactive mode press 'M' and it will uninstall dependencies; then upgrade. It saves a lot of bandwidth on the upgrade. I haven't tried it myself and so YMMV.Jay Zach wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brooks R. Robinson wrote:Greetings oh most knowledgeable list, I recently purchased a new fancy schmancy Dell a couple of months ago, and I have been delinquent in installing Linux on it. So, I recently purchased an additional hard drive and attempted to put Debian on it (as God intended). Sarge didn't want to recognize my hardware and Sid just plain crapped out. I tried to do a Knoppix install, but I don't like their one big partition methodology. I ended up putting the base "server" install of Ubuntu 5.10 "The Breezy Badger" on it (which was also quite the pain the the keester, for the record I hate initrd). So I have a semi-usable system, finally accomplished last night. Now for the question: Can I, without too much heartburn, upgrade my install the Etch or Sid? Is it as simple as changing my sources.list, doing and apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade? I'm sure I'll end up with a bunch of cruft, but I'd rather be on Debian proper than Ubuntu. Any thoughts would be helpful. Please CC me as I am not on the list. Thanks, BrooksIf you have your /home directory mounted on a separate partition (I HIGHLY recommend this), you can simply install debian, and mount your ubuntu /home asyour /debian home.Except that he's already stated that neither Sarge nor Sid have been agreeable to being installed on his hardware.As I understand it, Brooks, Ubuntu is close enough to Debian that a conversion is possible. Yes, edit your sources.list and do an update/dist-upgrade; you may have to uninstall some stuff along the way and then reinstall it. Since it's a new install, and you have nothing to lose, just go for it. The worst that can happen is that you'll cause some sort of time-space implosion and destroy the universe as we know it. But it'll probably go a lot smoother than that.
Regards Clive