Re: upgrading ubuntu to debian

On Thursday 30 August 2007 20:19:06 Britton Kerin wrote:
I just bought a computer that came with ubuntu and would like to switch
it to pure debian. Is there a standard way to do this that someone
could point me to?

(Though I will say that little hack where the shell tells you which
package a program is in looks pretty cute and helpful :)

Thanks,
Britton

There are plenty of messages in this thread to make one think that it is
possible to convert from Debian to Ubuntu and vice versa, but let me point
out one thing that many have overlooked.

Since Ubuntu uses sudo for everything, when using programs that require root
access expect the user password, not the root one. So if you enable the root
account, you might think, OK, I need to use the root password here (after all
early versions of Ubuntu actually asked for the root password) but no, it
still wants the user password (the first user, who is defined in the sudoers
file)

AFAIK, gksu and kdesu both act this way, as does the "administrator mode" in
the GUI apps. From what I understand, these utilities are hacked to use
sudo.

Do yourself a favor and just backup /home and install Debian, then slowly but
surely copy the files from the backup to the new /home. Be careful though,
different versions of some programs have different configurations, and can
cause problems if you're using a config file for a different version of a
program.

Joe


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