Updated Instructions!!! Howto Upgrade a Running Slackware 3.0 System to Debian 1.1 ---------------------------------------------------------- I have the problem that our main server has to be up almost 24hrs a day but yet I need to switch to Debian since Slackware is becomming badly outdated.
Here is how to do it. Note that Debian is not yet running since I am still stuck at step 9 trying to get as much as I can of my old configuration over to the new system before rebooting. 1. Prepare an empty partition and mount it on /new 2. untar buzz-fixed/disks-i386/*14/base1_1.tgz on it 3. Setup /new/etc/fstab /new/etc/localtime, /new/etc/hostname etc. 4. make a directory /new/ftp and mount your NFS Server with the Debian distribution 5. Activate Debian 1.1 in a chroot environment chroot /new bash 6. Mount the proc filesystem lest cron and at will not install: mount /proc 7. Install debian packages Run dselect and dpkg to install aditional packages from the /ftp directory. Its amazing how much you can do with two distributions on one machine this way. You should even be able to compile programs. Be careful what daemons are started in the chroot environment. Kill them off ASAP otherwise they might mess up something in your Slackware setup. 8. Fix some stuff The process of moving the configuration files from the old root to the new root is probably now to be done and the most painful in the process. 9. Reconfigure lilo to boot with the new partition You better have alternate boot possibilities now if something goes wrong. 10. Reboot Fix more things that broke with the change <G>! Or reboot with the old system.