On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 08:14:39AM +0700, Oki DZ wrote: > Bruno Boettcher wrote: > > I have a running slackware system on a computer which lacks a CD.... so > > since > > this is a running linux system i figure that it should be possible to > > migrate > > it towards debian.... is there somewhere a help about this? would it be > > enough > > to install apt? > > Of course, it will always be possible to migrate to Debian, and the way > is called: install from scratch. > > All right, maybe this doesn't help... but I don't think that there's a > simple way (install Debian and you preserve everything; apps, your > personal files, your system's settings in /etc) to do it.
You're right that it isn't simple--at least not seamless--but it's certainly possible. My system was originally Slackware, and I've gradually "Debianized" it over the course of a year or two. I'm actually amazed by how few problems I came across in doing that. (I'm sure it was in some part just dumb-luck, but hey.) So here are some tips for Bruno (sorry, I missed the original message)--I hope others will add anything important that I miss. You'll first need to make sure you have a working glibc2.x (libc6) installed. I think Slackware now does have this as a non-default library--if not there's an excellent HOWTO out there somewhere on making the upgrade--it should be at the official LDP sites by now. The next thing you'll want to do is to install the dpkg package. (dpkg and its helper programs are the "back-end" of all the other packaging tools like apt, gnome-apt, and dselect.) Debian packages are currently "ar" archives that contain (among other things) a file called data.tar.gz that has the bulk of what gets installed. So get the dpkg .deb from ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/base/dpkg_1.4.0.35.deb and extract it from the root directory: cd /; ar -pf dpkg_1.4.0.35.deb data.tar.gz |tar -xzv >From there you can go on to install apt--make sure you have libstdc++2.9 installed, get apt from the "admin" rather than "base" directory of the above link, then do a: dpkg --install --force-depends apt_0.3.10slink11.deb After that, make sure a line like this: deb http://ftp1.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free is in your /etc/apt/sources.list, download Debianized C libraries to /var/cache/apt/archive/ like so: apt-get update; apt-get -d install libc5 libc6 And for the grand finally (and this *could* possibly screw your system, I can't make guarantees here): dpkg --install --force-depends /var/cache/apt/archive/libc5*.deb dpkg --install --force-depends /var/cache/apt/archive/libc6*.deb >From here on, you should be able to install any debian package with just "apt-get install packagename". You want to be very careful about this at first, and lots of little things will go wrong, but it should keep getting easier as you go. Even the above actually won't go as smoothly as I've made it out to be, so feel free to email me about problems you encounter if you decide to take the plunge. HTH, -Kevin
