[Malvern] Ubuntu and Debian.

[Keith Edmunds]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 22:44:27 +0000
Geoff Bagley <geoff.bagley at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Is it possible to take an Ubuntu installation, and to cause
> it to revert to Debian ?

Not easily. Ubuntu is derived from Debian, but a lot of the basic
packages have been "Ubuntu-ised", and it would be considerably more
work to migrate from Ubuntu to Debian than it would be to install
Debian from scratch. The way I would do it would be to backup /etc plus
any user data needed (and backup part or all of /var if you have
settings in there that are needed, such as Samba passwords), and save
the output of 'dpkg --get-selections' to a file. I'd then install
Debian from scratch and run 'dpkg --set-selections < file-saved-earlier
&& apt-get dselect-upgrade' to reinstall all the packages you had
before. That should get you 95% of the way there.

Why do you want to do this?

Keith

-- 
Keith Edmunds

+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Tiger Computing Ltd  |  Helping businesses make the most of Linux  |
|  "The Linux Company"  |       http://www.tiger-computing.co.uk      |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+