Re: upgrading ubuntu to debian

[Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com>]

On Thursday 30 August 2007, Michael Pobega wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 10:19:06AM -0800, Britton Kerin wrote:
> > I just bought a computer that came with ubuntu and would like to
> > switch it to pure debian.  Is there a standard way to do this that
> > someone could point me to?
> >
> > (Though I will say that little hack where the shell tells you which
> >  package a program is in looks pretty cute and helpful :)
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Britton
>
> Unless you REALLY know what you're doing, upgrading from Ubuntu to
> Debian (And vice-versa) is nearly impossible and unsupported by the
> Debian community (If you did try it, we probably wouldn't be able to
> help you). Too many things are done differently between the two
> operating systems, for example, while Debian uses root to do many
> tasks by default Ubuntu has no true root user and instead uses sudo.

While it's just a small, niggling detail and may be just semantics, 
there is a true root account on Ubuntu that can be used the same as a 
root account on any Debian release.  The only difference is it doesn't 
have a password on setup.  I used:

sudo passwd
(or maybe it was sudo passwd root)

and created a password for root and can use my root account on my Ubuntu 
workstation just like I do the root account on any of my Debian 
servers.

Hal