Migrate from Debian to Ubuntu

[Sajjad Anwar]

Hello.

Ah it seems I am bored of Debian. But since i have been using it for quite a long time, it is very well customized. Packages + Lots of data. So can anyone suggest me to change over to Ubuntu keeping these settings intact? Or is this question ridiculous? :)

Regards.

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Sajjad Anwar
http://geohackers.in
http://fsugcalicut.org
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[Saral Sasidharan]

@ Sajjad I'm not sure of the result but try this after taking a back up

Chnge the repositories

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted

Then update the package list and install sudo if you don't already have it installed:
# apt-get update
As a first step to getting all the installed packages in order, you can manually force a reinstall of every package on your system to the specific version available in Ubuntu, but since a typical Debian system has over a thousand packages installed, that can be rather tedious. You can save yourself some time by writing a little script like this:
#!/bin/sh
for name in \Qdpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$' \\
| awk '{print $1}'\Q
do
sudo apt-get install --assume-yes ${name}=\Qapt-cache show $name \\
| grep '^Version' | awk '{print $2}'\Q
done

It's highly likely that some packages you have previously installed from the Debian archives won't "cross-grade" cleanly to the version available in Ubuntu, and you may have to manually uninstall some packages to allow the process to complete. Depending on how your system is set up, you may need to do a lot of poking and prodding to get to the point where:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade


can execute cleanly.
Once you have your existing packages converted to the Ubuntu versions, it's time to pull in the core Ubuntu packages:
$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-standard ubuntu-desktop


The result won't be perfect, but you should then have a system that is a reasonable approximation of a full Ubuntu install.


Saral





Seen at a link    http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-21741.html

[Sajjad Anwar]

Thank you Saral. I would definitely try that out.
But it seems my Debian system is crashing frequently. Also X server gets errors frequently. These errors are following some installation without satisfying the dependencies and also a system update. So I guess i have to go for a clean installation.

Hope to get it work.
Thank you.

Regards.

[Saral Sasidharan]

@Sajjad

Can u let me know u'r HW configuration especially MB Chipset size of Ram ...

Saral Sasidharan

[Anoop Jacob Thomas]

Copy you home folder as such if it is not in a separate partition. Otherwise you can use the same /home without reformatting while installing Ubuntu.
It will keep all the application settings, even your wallpaper it seems.

--
Anoop Jacob Thomas
Trivandrum

http://anoop.caremedia.org