Re: Migration from Debian/powerpc to Debian/i386

On Sat, 2006-12-30 at 13:29 -0300, Eduardo Trápani wrote:
Hi,

I'm currently using Debian on an iMac G5. Everything is alright but I
have to hand the computer over to another user and I will get a PC in
return.

I'm not sure what would be the best path to follow to recreate my debian
environment in the new machine. I cannot repackage packages because the
architecture is different,but maybe there is an automatic tool to save
the configuration and the list of packages.

On top of that, I don't know if things like MySQL databases can be
simply copied or if I should export/import them. Is there a way to know
if a package data is platform independent? (little/big endian issues
and things like that).

Install a base-only system on the new machine.

On the old machine:

dpkg --get-selections > my-packages.txt
tar jcf my-etc.tar.bz /etc

Copy this file to a medium that works on either machine (scp, a usb
thumb.. etc)

On the new machine from the transfer method of your choice:

cat my-packages.txt | dpkg --set-selections
apt-get dselect-upgrade

Extract you /etc in a temporary location, do comparisons between the
ones form the old machine and the current ones in /etc. Make the changes
as needed (or if not relevant now ignore them)

Of course this will not be fool proof, some things will need to be
hashed out. But all in all it should go very well.

For the DBs, you'll need to export and import them, being the safest
way. The only packages that are platform independent are the "all"
packages, which are mainly some text scripts and documentation.

To bad about losing the G5, its a nice platform to work on.
--
greg, greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The technology that is
Stronger, better, faster: Linux

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