Migration from Debian

[kel]

I am considering moving a rather large install of Debian Jessie without systemd (actually its systemd-shim) to funtoo (or possibly gentoo if this is not feasible).

 

My apologies for not knowing very much about this distro, as I would like to know if this is feasble before inveesting more time and research.

 

In short I want to basically keep my Debian programs/utilities system intact, while migrating its base system to the new system. I dont care about the DE's, for example - but I would certainly like to maintain my Wine and Eclipse installs, for example. Its not feasible for me to start from scratch on this machine.

 

Once set up, I would be happy to stay with Funtoo (as I assume as a compiler distro that it it not limited to git).

 

Many thanks in advance for any advice proffered.

[iwoloschin]

I don't believe it is possible, without a ridiculous amount of effort, to migrate between any two Linux distros like this.  Minor changes in configuration files, whole new package managers, the changes grow to be quite insurmountable.  For any support here you would need to do a fresh installation.

 

That being said, copying user data (like /home/kel) over wouldn't be too difficult.  But the system itself, that'd need to be done from scratch, even if you were just moving to Ubuntu.

[kel]

I don't believe it is possible, without a ridiculous amount of effort, to migrate between any two Linux distros like this.  Minor changes in configuration files, whole new package managers, the changes grow to be quite insurmountable.  For any support here you would need to do a fresh installation.

 

That being said, copying user data (like /home/kel) over wouldn't be too difficult.  But the system itself, that'd need to be done from scratch, even if you were just moving to Ubuntu.

 

I may need to stick with what I have for now, though I intend on adding to, and even replacing Win7 on a machine here in a few months. It wont need to be a *large* install, so I would certainly want a traditional Posix type Linux on it, and compilier based would not be problematic. Funtoo would seem the best option at that time from what I understand of it.

 

Two (hopefully) quick questions:

I assume that  should the need arise, there is basic compatibility with Gentoo. (Outside of the DE morass that is making me consider WMs).

 

That on many *simple* programs - I can simply extract the Debian binaries and docs, and dump them into /opt .

[iwoloschin]

There is general compatibility with Gentoo, in that usually a Gentoo ebuild will work on Funtoo.  There's some special cases, mostly around very important system tools (GCC being one) that get weird, but you probably don't want to be playing too much with those right away anyways, just use whatever Funtoo provides, at least until you get a bit more comfortable.

 

For "simple" programs, why would you extract a Debian binary instead of just using Portage?  Most programs are probably in the Portage tree, I would encourage you to use that first.  If there's a program you can't find then yes, you can *probably* extract a Debian package and dump it into /opt, but you'd have to be careful about providing the proper libraries too!  Do you have any examples of a "simple" program?

[nrc]

If you have an extra partition or drive just install Funtoo there and use mounts and/or sym links to get to what you need in the old installation.  That's what I did to transistion from Fedora.