Hi!

I've a Linux installation (Shrike with customized applications) on a old machine with poor performance and I would like to transfer it to a new machine without a need of reinstalling everything from the scratch. I'm familiar with that task while using windows machines whereby the problem of drivers incompatibility is solved by repairing the installation, now in linux how do I resolve the problem? Do I also have to find similar CD of Shrike and repair installation after putting the hard drive on new machine? How do I do that? Just upgrading the OS will resolve the problem, or is there another way round to do that?

Thanks,
Stefano

I think it would be best to first try to understand why you would not want to start with a clean installation? Is it that you're not familiar with the applications that need to be migrated? Are they tied to the machine in terms of distribution release-specific dependencies? Anything else?

Of course you could do a recon run and just install (the vulnerable, no longer maintained and utterly deprecated) Shrike on the Dell to find the kernel doesn't recognise all the hardware, userland can't take advantage of what's offered, et cetera. Or you could install Centos 5.3 (since you're familiar with RH anyway) and do a test migration. If that fails in an irrepairable way you could always decide to reinstall Centos from scratch and use virtualization (VMware?) to bring the Shrike back to life again...