Hey. I'd like to go from Debian to Gentoo. Is there anyway to elegantly do that, short of clearing the drive and freshly installing Gentoo? I am worried mostly about keeping my data, but I'm not interested in burning it all to disc if it can be avoided.

I usually just tar up /etc and /home these 2 directories should have all your configs and data. let me know if you need help with the gentoo install.

I always use a separate /home partition for this reason.

Yeah I usually do that to.

I think I'll make a home partition next time around, yeah.

Thanks steve, I'll certainly keep that in mind. I don't expect to have problems, but then again I don't know what to expect at all, really.

just send me a pm if you get stuck. I've done plenty of gentoo installs on a few different architectures.

As a die hard Debian user I would not trash my Debian installation before I know that I like the new distro more.

Install Virtualbox, and Gentoo in the VB. (Recommend to use the .deb package from virtualbox.org, not the Debian version)

If you do a new install anyway: keeping /etc is not a good idea, many config files are different. And yes, a separate /home directory is very convenient. However, do not rely too much on keeping things like the .kde directory. Usually it takes more time to fix problems than to reconfigure KDE. (Or Gnome)

jlinkels

Oh I should have mentioned, I don't just untar /etc/. I keep it so that I can get out the configs I need and place them in the new /etc/.

I like debian too, jilinkels, but my ultimate objective is to move from distribution to distribution in ascending order of complexity. Once I have an "idea" of how gentoo is, I'll very likely look for a next one.

Installing gentoo is a bit more of a task than I anticipated, but I've learned plenty already, and any progress is progress indeed.

If I really want debian back, I have the iso's burned.