Right now I have a laptop and a server that both run Mandrake 9.1. I understand linux enough now (it's been a few years) that I don't have to rely on GUI for everything, so I was going to switch to slackware and streamline things a little.

I have already downloaded all 4 iso's and plan to burn them and install on the laptop sometime this week. There isn't really any vital servers or anything running on here, so it will be a good chance to get my feet wet and if I mess up, just reinstall and start over.

Here's my question, since I still have mandrake on the laptop (in fact I'm using it right now to make this message), what, if any, should I backup that will save me some headaches in the future? Is there a good command to get a system summary of all the hardware, drivers, partitions, etc.? That is pretty much all I can think that I would have to do, besides the few shell scripts I made. Just trying to find some way of getting all that other information so that I can then just print it out.

this depends on what you want to keep around. i think, on the basis of things you voiced,

>> "a good command to get a system summary of all the hardware, drivers, partitions, etc.?"

i'd just keep the following:

1) a copy of all of /etc : this has most of your configurations for various servers, daemons, etc. (as per the directory).

2) a copy of all of /proc (if you have it in mandrake) : this is location of various important process files in slack, but not sure about other distros

these should both be relatively small (on the order of 50MB) and easily fit on a zipdisk or move over the network you have. pretty much anything you could need (records and configuration -wise) is in there for future reference. slackware should be easily configurable to whatever you want, so you probably won't need any info about the laptop configuration. there are commands in slackware so that you can see the chipset of any device attached to the computer (in /proc; easily viewed with lspci, cardmgr, using dmesg, etc.), and then identify it with a driver that's either (a) already configurable in the kernel or (b) available as a module from either source/bin. if it's something like the video chipset, you can just refer to online manuals about your make/model of laptop.

gl,
y-p

Dude - you presumably would also want to save your /home directory too, assuming you don't want to lose any of your own files. I will agree 100% with yocompia about saving the /etc directory though. -- J.W.