I have selected Debian Woody for my dedicated web server and being a RH Fedora user on my existing systems I need to migrate these to Debian - so I can get familiar with the setup/config and directory structure.

I was thinking of running Woody on my dev server and perhaps Sarge on my notebook (dual boot WinXP)

Question is how to go about installing Debian over an existing Red Hat install.

I can back up everything important so if the installer will support it I guess I just choose the desired partition and do a clean install?

Or is there a better way - like preserving some partition or portion of the tree from the original distro? (I hope this is understandable!?)

I have ordered the 7 CDs.

Should I really be considering ubuntu for the ease of install (at least for the notebook??)

Any help greatly appreciated,

.*\x\\\\_

For your laptop Sarge should do fine. I have a c640 as well and used the sarge net installer and it found everything fine. As a side note i did a dist-upgrade to sid and sid will work find on the laptop also. Only thing I didn't mess with was wireless but it did detect it, just never used it.

As for installing over...i would recommend backing up important data and doing a clean install over it.