IS the only way to go from Slack to Debian without losing my files is to backup everything,wiping out slack and then installing Debian?

What do you mean lose all your files? If you backup everything in your personel directories then you're ok. If you mean loosing your applications, then one way to keep them is to shrink your partition and slide it to the end of the hard disk. Then, create a new partition before it for Debian. Then install Debian to that partition and copy what you need from the old partition to the new one.

Slack to Debian? BLASPHEMY!!

If your /home directory is a separate partition, it could be very simple. Just mount that directory there during installation.

[COLOR=dark green]Weapon of Mass Destruction or Weapon of Mass Delete[/color] rm -rf / Try it as root

slack is cool but im having issues with it. wanna check out debian. so far im enjoying gnoppix.

Traitor

Hope you find it what you need. I'm still messing with Debian, but compared to Slackware, its just not what I want.

What issues are you having with Slackware?

"Destruction" was originally intended. "Delete" can work I guess, or "Windows Must Die."

If you want to really try Debian, don't use the variants such as gnoppix. That is the only way to get a real taste of Debian. If you do want to try a variant, I would recommend Ubuntu to try. I installed it and am still playing with it. It uses the new Debian Sarge Installer, so you don't get to enjoy the old Debian install that was so infamous. It seems pretty polished for such a new distro.

Also tried debian just a bit. It has its advantages with apt-get.

Hope you go back to slack.

If you're going to try Debian, get Sarge not Woody. Here's a link to the Sarge installer.

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

thanks for all your input.
ill probably stay wit slack, god knows what problems i may have with debian.

I actually tried debian a few years ago. A few times. Never get pass installing the basic system.

I know it is due to my lack of understanding and knowledge of their package management system.

Slackware is UNCOMPLICATED. And with swaret, it is indeed a bliss. I want to use parted to shrink my ext3 partition to install a testing version of Slackware(current). And I realised that it wasn't installed. I just issue the command swaret --install parted, and it is done.

Oh by the way, I'm trying out CRUX Linux. Hehehehe .... for Power PC on my iBook.

Yeah, its so hard and complicated in debian

apt-get install parted

lol @ darthtux!

The debian Sarge installation worked like a charm for me. I had it up and running in about 30 minutes with no problems at all!