Re: [gentoo-user] move instalation from one system to another one.

["Daniel da Veiga" <danieldaveiga@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Nicolas Sebrecht
<nicolas.s-dev@laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Sebastian Günther a écrit:
>
>> If you want such functionality, use Debian or Ubuntu.
>
> Or just use the good C*FLAGS and kernel options.
>

Nicolas is right, you can (at your own risk, of course) do a migration
like this, so "DON'T" is not really the only option, and changing
distros is NOT an option in most cases. Gentoo is perfectly capable of
that.

Change flags in make.conf for generic compatible ones, compile a new
kernel (I used genkernel for the migration, and compiled a specific
kernel for the new machine later), emerge -e world and transfer the
system (I used rsync, and had to deal with some network issues),
everything worked (after some fine tunning for the new hardware) for
me. Sometimes the effort is worth, it was my case, YMMV. It takes a
little while (for me, the migration itself took a Sunday afternoon,
like 6 hours), but you can still use your system while emerge does its
work, and while the new kernel compiles. Its less time than a normal
install from the ground up (with the whole configuration process, X,
Window Manager, etc). After the migration, change flags again, and let
emerge do its magic, while you can keep working.

PS: I kept my old system as a backup for a few weeks.

PS2: I had an old Athlon XP 1.2GHz and migrated the whole system to a
Core Duo 2.8GHz, as you may imagine, both machines were COMPLETELY
different, but still I kept all my preferences, packages, files, all
of it. An year before the migration, the Athlon XP was running a
CHOST=i386 and I changed it to i686 with success. Gentoo is sometimes
just magical.

-- 
Daniel da Veiga