Re: Old mixed distro machine upgrade to stable: possible? worth it?
On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 09:26:46AM -0700, Jaime Herazo B. wrote:
> Lately i got to help a friend that has been playing around with linux
> for a while. One of his machines has been mostly neglected on the
> upgrading (the well-tuned firewall made him complacent i guess), and
> is far behind. Initially he installed it from a Mepis CD, back when it
> was still based off pure debian (it's ubuntu-oriented these days),
[snip description of a multiple-distro-linux-in-one-filesystem-mess.
> Do you guys think it's worth to do a dist-upgrade to stable at this
> point? i'm inclined to just format it and be done with that mess, but
> he doesn't want to go that route since he'd have to reconfigure it all
> (i'd personally be willing to pay that price to be able to have the
> comfort of trusting the contents of the machine). Do you think it'd be
> good to give it a shot anyway? or would it just be a complicated way
> of delaying the unavoidable?
Things have changed so much that he'll have to reconfigure things
anyway. Especially difficult things like email (with exim4).
Copy /etc plus anything of his own (e.g. /home, /usr/local, /var/local,
/opt (not that Woody had it).
Then do a bare-metal install.
But wait.
What hardware is this box? The box I had on which I installed Potato
for the first time doesn't have enough memory to run Etch's installer.
So we need to know what hardware (CPU, Memory, drive space) to plot a
safe upgrade path.
Doug.
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