Changing horses in midstream (was Re: [TriLUG] FC2 now perfect?)

[Rick DeNatale]

On 4/28/05, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think DAG's apt4rpm repo is fairly current.  I'll probably move my
> home mail/web server over to either debian/unbuntu or freebsd when I
> get back.  Dunno which, just depends on my mood. :)

I'm even further back, still running on RH9. I've been getting more
and more confused about where to go.

After the last meeting, some guys recommended debian. The argument
against FC, as I understood it, was that there was that the release
cycle was long so I was less likely to find the latest stuff. When I
started looking at real debian, it looked worse though. When I looked
at the upstream version numbers of stuff, my RH9 system, which I'd
been keeping up to date via Fedora Legacy, and has some new stuff from
places like Dag's repo seemed to have lots of packages which were
newer.  Sarge is better but now I'm looking at Ubuntu, since they seem
to be ahead of the curve, but still are in the Debian stream.

One of the things I did like about Debian was the cross-install idea
which is to use debootstrap in a chroot on a running system to build a
new installation without having to bring the system down, and to be
able to do some testing before cutting over.  I'd assume that the same
could be done with ubuntu. I found a similar idea on the ubuntu wiki
but they seemed to be talking about doing this on top of the existing
system rather than in a chroot jail which seems dangerous.  I also
found a script called debtakeover which someone wrote to replace an
existing colo server system with debian which I'm planning to try to
grok before I make a move.

Does anyone have any experience with installing a debian based distro
on a running linux system? Preferably installing Ubuntu on top of RH.