I've been struggling to work with my Redhat Psyche release for the past few months, and much to my surprise, getting updates from the Redhat network is a pain in the neck. Well, mainly because I'm a poor college student who doesn't want to pay for bandwidth from their update sites.

My genius friend who's been using Linux for the past couple years turned me on to the idea of changing to the Debian distribution. I've downloaded the CD images for the Woody release and I'm ready to go about it when all of a sudden... I get completely lost in the brief and vague instructions from the Debian manual.

They make it seem like you have to repartition your hard drive to install Debian on a hard drive that already has Linux on it. Is that true? I notice that the Debian distribution contains many of the same packages already on my system. Why can't I simply "dump" the Debian stuff on top of the Redhat stuff and save time and hard drive space (not to mention conflicts with older versions of packages)?

I don't want to repartition my hard drive since I darn near lost everything the first time around- besides, it seems counterproductive to have several hundred megabytes of duplicate packages on two different partitions for the distributions. Is there a quick and easy way to install Debian onto my existing Linux Redhat release?

First of all, back up all of your data files and stuff in the /home directories
if /home is not on a separate partition ( as it should be).

Then create the Debian installation CD-ROMS, re-partition your disks
as necessary, or just format the old ones with the exception of /home
and any other with non system stuff, and install Debian.

Thanks Corin! It was a success!

Took less than an hour, too... as opposed to the week it took me to get RedHat running. I guess the learning curve is a steep one.

I always recommend that you load any new distros on a seperate partition and dual boot until you know you want to switch.
There is no reason a "learning curve" should stand in your way.
Maybe it will take you weeks to decide and maybe years. That is really no problem.
Unless you have a 120MB drive.