Ok so I have already converted my workstation (and my fiancee’s) over to Ubuntu. That leaves my laptop and my home file server.

You may be asking yourself why I’m converting all my boxes. At the moment - it’s really just for sanity. You see I run SID on everything because it’s the only way I can keep up to date. Unfortunately that ends up breaking from time to time (especially if I don’t update all the time). Ubuntu is hopefully going to get me off that crazy train. Dapper Drake is going to be out April 10th. Breezy just came out and they already have the release date set. I guess I just kind of like that.

Some people seem to be nervous about Ubuntu on a “server”. I end up running Gnome on this “server” anyway so I don’t know that it is much differnt from a normal desktop other than the fact that it is running software RAID. Underneath Ubuntu is Debian - so I would think they would have to do something terribly stupid in order to dimish the server component.

I originally tried to do some of the apt-get update tricks to migrate over (Which if you are on sarge you may be able to do that - see the bottom of the article) , but since all my computers were on Sid it turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. It’s ok because I made backups before I started so I can always go back.

I tried to do a very complicted solution to my probelm involving debootstrap. Which is a pretty cool tool, and FYI it natively supports ubuntu. Well about step 10 of the process I hosed the box. Basically I moved a directory I shouldn’t have and lost even the most basic commands - like ls/mv etc.

So I busted out a cdrom drive and hooked it up to the file server. (Actually it turned out to be a dvd drive which I think I’m leaving in there now that I found it.) Anyway - I fired up the install cd for Breezy. I was really scared about doing the install this way because my files server runs software RAID1. It even boots of of a raided partition. It was a pain to setup in the first place. I didn’t look forward to having to go through that again. But I was prepared.

The screens booted up and I got the most wonderful suprise. The installer could see all of my RAID partitions. It let me work with them just like normal partitions. I was even able to switch to the console, move all the old data on the root partition to a directory called /old and continuing the install.

I can’t tell you how awesome this is - I mean it is so nice to beable to just put in a cd and not have to figure out what to do with 400 GB of backups and data, but at the same time be able to install a new linux distro.

Now I know this feature is probably available now for Debian too - but for me it is just another nice thing about Ubunutu - getting it up and running is dead simple.

Actually when I rebooted I got a kernel panic. I was thinking - damn it - I spoke too soon again! But it turns out that the problem was that I forgot to move all the old kernels out of the way on /boot and the installer defaults to the first kernel it finds when it reboots - which in this case was 2.4.1 which was none too happy about my setup :)

Also in the process of getting every up I found a this site which has some nice grub splash screens for startup. - One piece of advice - download whatever pictures you want - the copy one of them to /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz - then run update-grub. This will automatically link in the image and things will work nicely.

If you need more you can go here

Now I just have to get everything configured the way I like it -but that should be the easy part!

Alternate Solution

If you are using a released version of debian you might be able to do this: (from : Here) It didn’t work for me - but it did for other people.

/etc/apt/sources.list :
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deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-updates main restricted universe multiverse

# If you want fresh backports:
#deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports hoary-backports main universe multiverse restricted
#deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports hoary-extras main universe multiverse restricted
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted universe multiverse
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

/etc/apt/preferences :
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Package: *
Pin: release hoary
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 200
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This downgrade all to "hoary" release ;-)

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade