Changing from a Debian based distro to Mageia

[aldQueiroz]

Hi, everybody!
After a traumatic experience with latter update of a well-known Debian based OS in my own personal desktop (CPU AMD Athlon 64, BIOS Phoenix, and 4GB of RAM) , I'm considering to change to Mageia in it. However, I have a lot of stuff already installed in it, which I'm afraid it wouldn't be easy to re-install (the worst is a Java-based Income Tax program...). My question is: if I backup all those directories of interest (/home, and /etc) as tar files, once I replace that failed OS with Mageia, could I just decompress the backup to proper directories without further concerns?... Would it work?
Thanks for your attention!

[isadora]

My approach in such a situation would be, to give it a try by installing the new distro into a virtual environment (Virtualbox, or others).
This gives an easy way of trying the new distro and you can fiddle around with your other stuff, like this Income Tax-program.
Just a thought!!!!

[djennings]

Restoring /home from a tar file will probably be OK although you may have to change the ownership of all the files in the users /home to ensure the uid and gid numbers are correct. (Mageia will create the first user with uid:gid of 500:500 )
You may also need to delete/rename the kde and gnome configuration directories to ensure they get recreated with consistent defaults.

I would not suggest doing a blanket restore on /etc but instead do a review and selective restore where necessary.
I would not expect any Java application to give any trouble since it will not depend on anything in /etc.

[JoesCat]

I would suggest doing a generic install first, and then creating a ~/temp where you then untar your prior /etc and /home into.

Then one by one, take a look at, merger or modify, convert your prior info into your new system.
Time consuming - yes, but, best chance of success.

Mageia is closer to Mandriva, SuSE and RedHat in similarity and root heritage than it is to Debian. There "are" going to be differences between Mageia and the Debian system, some are subtle, others are noticeable. Mageia is going to default-call certain programs of choice for certain functions, and your prior /etc and /home may refer to programs that may not even exist on Mageia, but are done by another program instead.

Good luck, but do it methodically and patiently to reduce the possibility of problems.

[jj83]

First off, /home should really be a separate partition. I never bother deleting configuration files from my home directory, as most programs have a migration function for past versions, and the ones that don't simply overwrite the files when you set the new parameters.

Secondly, nothing in your /etc will be compatible with another distro. Your tax program may have installed itself to /opt, if not /usr, but I can't imagine it would put itself in /etc. If you want to keep /etc as a reference for when you want to fiddle with .conf files, do so, but with great care. You don't need to change uid:gid of files after untaring them, tar automatically gives the files uid:gid of the user who executed the command. If you untar as root and then want to set uid:gid later, the command to do so is
chown uid:gid /home/mydirectory/ -R
where you replace uid with your number or user name, and gid likewise.

Thirdly, Java based programs don't generally need installation. Are you referring to the desktop menu entry for the program? If so, you may want to save the .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/ which applies to it, and then restore it after you install Mageia. But other than that, just make sure you save the folder where it was installed to.