Switching from Suse to Gentoo

[SIR]

Ok, I'm an old Gentoo user, and I want to install Gentoo on my machine again.

I haven't used Gentoo in almost two years. I used to have an ancient laptop, had a Stage 1 install on it an everything. I bought a new laptop, used mostly Windows for a while, gave the old laptop away, and then wanted to get back on Linux. So, because it was easy for me to do, I installed Suse 10.0 on the machine, and had it do all the partitioning and boot setup.

Recent events in the news have made me want to get rid of Suse. I'm still debating on which distribution to replace it with, but I'm leaning toward Gentoo.

What I want to know, is can I basically keep my drive partitions in place as they are now? I've got my Windows partition, along with /, /swap, and /home partitions. If possible, I'd like to keep my hands off /home and not affect anything (but for sure I'll be backing it up with a DVD). I don't want to touch my Windows partition as well (got a few things there I have to run).

Or, should I just wipe out my three Linux partitions for a clean Gentoo install?

I searched the forums and didn't find anything, if you could please point me to some information, I'd appreciate it.
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K6-2 333 160MB
gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.8-r3

[Earthwings]

[sonicbhoc]

[dambacher]

There are easy and complicated ways to doing that.

The easyest way is to get a gentoo install cd, boot from it and
follow the installation instructions BUT
don't partition and create new file systems, but just mount every partitition of your old suse linux as normal
then remove everything but your home directory (keep a tar of your configurations files for security)
then continue with unpacking the stage3 tarball, chroot etc..
After installation, just add your old users back and have your old home directory handy.

The complicated way: you can use your running suse system to set up gentoo in a chroot.
if everything is ok for you, you can boot from some other device and use mv to move every file/dir in /home to /tmp and move everything from your chroot to /. install grub and kernel and reboot.
if something goes wrong, just revert the mv's.
this way I changed my server from suse to gento overnight last year.

[Genone]

Regarding keeping your /home partition: I don't know if this applies to Suse 10.0, but when we had a mixed Suse/Gentoo environment at University some config files weren't exactly compatible, most notably kde always had issues when it should use the config generated by the other distro (Suse KDE always acted like there was no config and ran the setup wizard again if KDE was last used from Gentoo).
Just something to keep in mind if you see any problems.

[rainer]

My experience with a few Gentoo installs I have been doing recently (I found a complete new install safer than an upgrade of gcc and x11):

1. I have (following the Gentoo install docs) a separate /boot partition which SuSE I believe doesn't have. It is probably not necessary and messing around with the number and order of partitions has lead to desaster for me in one case, so /boot goes in the root partition.

2. Not only that KDE doesn't recogniz e the configuration files made by the same KDE version on the same OS - it even refuses to start the configuration wizard if you have re-created your users. KDE wants a clean new /home/userx directory!

3. Apart from backing the important data up, I moved all existing /home/userx directories into /home/old/userx directories and then removed the /home/userx directories. Then I re-created my useres (same UID etc.) on the command line and entered KDE, let the wizard do his job and had a clean new desktop.

4. From the corresponding /home/old/userx directory it was now possible to move over at least all data files, desktop shortcuts etc.; I didn't check for the configuration files, may be worth a try as well --

In a nutshell: Re-format your / partition, make sure that there are no directories with the names of future users in your /home directory, and then follow the install docs!

Rgds,
Rainer

[baigsabeeh]