>>>>> "Douglas" == Douglas L Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Douglas> I've got two machines, one slackware 3.0 (I think), and Douglas> the other is redhat 3.0.3 that I want to move to debian. Douglas> The problem is that they're too far away and I can't get Douglas> in front of them in person, so wiping the box and Douglas> installing from scratch really isn't an option. Douglas> Does anyone have any suggestions about how I can put on Douglas> dpkg and slowly install debian packages until I borg borg Douglas> borg the machines? I assume dpkg is available in Douglas> something like a .tar.gz that I can compile and put on Douglas> the boxes, and from there I can just start installing Douglas> package after package. Douglas> Anyone have any hints/suggestions for this? I've kept up Douglas> with Linux and the various distributions for some time, Douglas> so I know most of the gotchas caused by libc and kernel Douglas> upgrades already. Here is what I have done last Sunday. I wanted to upgrade my old slackware that didn't work any longer since I had installed a new version of gcc without reading the manual first. I tried first to use the floppy distribution of Debian. It didn't work since it requires a fresh partition. I had nothing to backup my hd so I didn't want to format the partitions. I try insist and to go to further steps (configurind modules and so on) but all what I managed to do was beeing anable to boot again. So, I decided to install a redhat from december infomagic cdrom (the base system (which brings a 2.0.x kernel) and C and C++ developpement utilities (so that I could compile a new kernel and dselect needs C++ to be compiled.). Then I found a debian distribution 1.2.7 from march pht mo'linux. I took the source of dpkg compile and install it. To be able to do that I had to comment the part of the makefile which call debiandoc-sgml (which was not installed). Then I started to dselect install the base distribution. May be for first installation following the amount of spare disk you have you should dselect emacs (which debian puts in /usr/lib/ rather than in /usr/local/share so that you could have twice the same version of emacs : - installation of ldso was ok - then I went in a circular dependency pb : (libc5 depends on dpkg which depends on libc5). I quit dselect and try to use dpkg --force-depends to install dpkg (it needed sysvinit first to have access to /etc/rc0.d which dkpg needs). Finally I got dpkg.deb installed but it didn't work (dselect was no longer able to find an access method, none were available). So I reinstall dpkg from the source distribution (Now it is recorded as installed so that depencies works and it is working). - i went back on dselect and went on installing : libc was ok ... after bash was installed dselect which probably use /bin/sh didn't work. So I quit dselect and made ldconfig -v and dselect worked again. But it started installation from beginning. In order to speed installation up I made dpkg --configure --pending to configure already unpacked packages and dslect again. Installation was ok with sometimes need for ld-config or dpkg --configure. Then I had to modify /etc/ld.so.conf and /dev/mouse and I had a slackware system patched with a debian one. I wouldn't dare saying I'm using a real debian system since I'm not sure that already existing software might not conflict with new installed debian software. And it brings to ask a question : How can I sweep my hd get rid of old files ? I've already made a perl script based on locate which find duplicated files (for exemple /usr/bin/emacs and /usr/local/bin/emacs). The result of my script looks like : emacs 96/8/6 /usr/bin/emacs emacs 96/9/28 /usr/local/bin/emacs Where the date is the date of last modification of files. Now I need to know the list of files installed by dpkg. Is there a debian command which could tell this. Sorry for being so long. Hope this could help. Gilles Douglas> -douglas -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .