Anthony Roy schreef: > I replaced SUSE with Gentoo on my server a few months back. I > installed Gentoo from Suse, so that the server stayed up and running > whilst I installed and configured everything. I did the install on a > separate partition, and once everything was configured and any data > copied over, I booted up into Gentoo properly. > > This way, I could mount the old Suse partition to have access to my > old configuration files, and fix any problems I was having. > > So basically, if you have space and a spare partition/drive, I would > install side by side until everything is working OK before binning > Suse. >
Yes, that's what I did as well (installed Gentoo from within a running SuSE install), but I've left my SuSE install as a fallback in the (increasingly unlikely) event that I bork Gentoo so badly that I can't boot it at all (and that the problems are more severe than can be easily fixed by just booting a LiveCD and fixing a couple of lines in a config file, which is the most typical situation). May I also point out a very useful SuSE feature that made this even easier; if you boot from the SuSE install disk when you have a currently-installed SuSE, you can choose to "Install to another directory". Basically this *moves* your SuSE install to another partition or drive, without doing anything else to it. So when I went to install Gentoo next to SuSE, I was running SuSE on a temp 20GB HDD (temp because I had only installed SuSE because I completely broke Gentoo during The Great PAM Debacle, and it was really just about as unfixable-- by me-- as Gentoo is ever likely to get, but I had no particular intention or desire to keep SuSE on the system; I just needed to run something while I reorganized to reinstall Gentoo.... took a year, iirc), but intended to install Gentoo (and SuSE) to my newly-bought 80GB HDD (and dump the 20 GB drive). So I used that SuSE feature to move the current installation to the 80GB drive, and after testing, removed the junk drive. So then I had SuSE on the 80GB, and was able to go through the regular Alternative Install as normal, installing Gentoo to other partitions of the same drive. SuSE is still in my GRUB menu and bootable, but honestly, I never boot into it, and in fact I mainly mount the partition in order to use the space on it to back stuff up temporarily. But if I really needed to, I could boot it, the kernel is still in /boot, and there's no reason there should be a problem doing so (since I do all the backing up to /usr/local, where it shouldn't bother anything if I needed to actually boot SuSE). HTH, Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
