Installing a new distro

[workingwriter]

Hi folks!

I'm not sure if I'm being greedy, lazy, adventurous or just plain stupid, but here's my question.

I have a stable, working system dual-booting Win98 and SuSE 8.0. I've got KDE configured just how I want it and a couple years' worth of email in my home dir. Everything's perfect, leave well enough alone, right?

I want to install Xandros on this box, ideally on the same partition. I probably have room for a third partition, but that would definitely mean a lot of copying over, no?

There's a lot of stuff on the web about installing a new distro and dual-booting with Windows, but nothing (that I can find anyway) on changing Linux distros. Anyone have some advice?

[o0zi]

Well, if you want to erase SuSe 8.0 then just install it as you installed SuSe, and everything should be OK.

Do you want to resize your partitions to make room for Xandros? Then you should look at parted (http://www.gnu.org/directory/GNU/gnuparted.html)

You can't install 2 distros on the same partition - they would mess up config files and so on.

[Sepero]

Originally posted by o0zi
You can't install 2 distros on the same partition - they would mess up config files and so on. Very true, especially since these two distros use different package management systems.

[motub]

Originally posted by workingwriter
Hi folks!

I'm not sure if I'm being greedy, lazy, adventurous or just plain stupid, but here's my question.

Well, I'm a person with 2 versions of Windows-- 98 and 2000-- multibooting with 4 (soon to be 5) distributions of Linux -- Mandrake 9.1, RedHat 9, College Linux 2.3 (Slackware) and Moprhix 0.4 (Debian), so speaking from experience, I have to vote for "on the road to plumb loco" ;) .

But OK. The two answers already given are correct, but I think maybe have missed a couple of points-- what you want to do is install Xandros over SuSE (erasing SuSE), but preserving your KDE settings and email ?

Is that right?

If so, the best thing to do/have done would be to use that third partition to create a new /home directory or storage space. Both the settings and the email, which are held in hidden folders in your /home/username folder, will be erased if they are part of the normal SuSE tree (subfolders of the / partition).

However if, during Xandros install, you specify an additional partition to be mounted and used as the /home directory (I assume you can do this during Xandros install, it seems modern enough), that partition will not be erased as long as you use a different username than the one you had under SuSE. The new /username folder will just be added to the one already there. You'd need to be root to see inside the old one and copy the data out, but it's a start.

If you create the third partition as a simple FAT32 or ext2/3 storage space for backup, it won't be touched at all, and you can just mount it when Xandros is installed and copy the data back, or use the data where it lays. This backup partition can even be mounted to your /home/username directory with full read/write permissions for yourself as user, by using a couple of options in /etc/fstab.

Using this strategy of creating a separate partition to hold data shared between distros (and Windows as well, if desired), you actually don't even have to erase your familiar distro to install a new one-- they can live happily side-by-side.

This is how people preserve their personal data when changing or reinstalling distros, and this is why partitioning is so critical to the whole process of installing a Linux distro, much less more than one.

Your KDE settings may not be "preserveable" in the sense that Xandros and SuSE may use different versions of KDE. For that and other reasons (userIDs, for example), you may very well be unable to just drop your current config files in and have the new settings work. You can keep the config files to use as reference, though-- and I suggest backing up to a temporary location on the Windows partition for all major config files, such as /etc/fstab, /etc/XF86Config-4, /etc/samba/smb.conf, ~/.kdedesktop, etc. If the Windows partition is auto-mounted (I assume Xandros will do at least this much, it seems modern enough;)), you'll have immediate access to the reference config files you need.

Menu settings I wouldn't worry about, as the menu schemes for SuSE and Xandros are likely different.

As for saving the email, a lot hangs on what email client you use. If Mozilla, it's very easy. Just copy the mail folder from your hidden profile folder (it's the one that starts with the server name) to a shared location, then when you install Mozilla, just open MozMail, go to Account Settings=>Server Settings, and enter the path to the folder with your stored mail at the bottom of the dialog. Close and reopen Mozilla Mail (also works for Thunderbird and probably Netscape) and your mail and mail filters will be just as you left them. Make sure to export your Address Book before wiping your current Mozilla installation, though-- this will not be transferred.

If you use Evolution, KMail, Opera or something else, you probably should look for an "export" command, and save your mail to a shared location, either on a new partition, or on your Win98 FAT32 partition, where you can see it and import it again after Xandros is installed.


Hope this helps.