Replacing Fedora and Windows with Debian
 

Hi

I have a dual boot set up on my desktop with Windows xp and Fedora 10, and I would like to replace both with a single install of Debian with the intention of running Windows in a virtual machine for occasional use.

My Fedora setup has a separate partition for my /home folder and what I would like to know is would it be a good idea/possible to keep this partition with all of its contents or would it cause any conflict with the files from Debian? Also should I keep any of the files from my /etc folder?

Also, is it possible to install iTunes on Debian with WINE or will I just have to install and run it from my Windows virtual machine?

It would be possible to keep your /home partition, but there could be potential conflicts between the left-over configuration files in it and the new ones that would be installed by Debian.

I've never done this, but one idea that comes to mind is to create a new username under Debian so that username's files would be put in a separate directory on /home.

Another would be not to use that partition for /home under Debian, but to create a new /home partition. Then mount the old one as a separate partition later and copy over the files you need or create a softlink to it so you can access the files easily.

Again, I haven't tested either of these and am just offering them as possible strategies to investigate.

I have done it and there was no conflict. The /home partition on this computer has been going for over 7 years, from Fedora 1 to CentOS 6 with a brief Debian interlude. One does accumulate a lot of redundant stuff, but it just sits there.

The one catch is the user id. Fedora currently uses 500, while Debian uses 1000. When I booted Debian for the first time, I got a message like 'This session has lasted 15 seconds. Unable to get mode 777 on .gnome'. Very helpful! All I had to do was switch to a console and do 'chown -R david /home'.

Keep in mind that not only the UIDs start at 500 in Fedora, but also the GIDs. Just to be complete on that one I would recommend to change it to the appropriate group also.

Thanks for your replies, I think I am leaning towards Franks suggestion of creating a new home directory when I install Debian and keep my old home directory as a separate partition to copy the files across at some point.

As far as iTunes goes I think it's supposed to be possible to install it under WINE but I've not managed it. I get the impression that if you do it won't be able to sync with any Apple devices either. I have iTunes installed on XP in Virtalbox and that works pretty well updating iOS on my iPad was a little tricky but it worked in the end and I can cable or wireless sync. fine.

Thanks, in that case I will install it on xp in my virtual machine. I was thinking of using qemu because it allows you to resize your virtual disk and I found Virtualbox to be a bit unstable on my XP install, but if the learning curve is steep I may just end up going back to virtualbox because I just want to use it for iTunes.

I haven't gotten around to trying qemu yet, though I intend to, but I can say I've found VirtualBox to be quite solid on Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Win7. Note that all of the versions I was using were far newer than Win XP, which is getting rather long in the tooth.

Thanks. That is nice to know.

Thanks will bear this in mind.