[nmglug] Installing apt on RH8

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 13:31 -0800, Tim Emerick wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestion to switch to debian.  I loaded debian sarge on an
> old P1-MMX-200 128MB ram.  Loaded samba on it and did a couple of test
> transfers.
> 
> The RH8 machine with a P4-1.8G processor transferred files at about 10mb/s
> while the Debian P1-200 did it at about 54mb/s.

Righteous.  That's quite a difference.  I wonder what is causing it?  I
hope it's not hardware, so that it remains fast after you go through the
trouble of the upgrade.

> That's it.  I don't know what the difference was other than Debian vs RH. 
> Now I'm just going to bite down and convert to Debian Sarge even though it's
> going to be a royal pain to set up again.

If you wanted to try and automate it, you could dump a listing of your
installed package set, then grep them out of:

 apt-cache search '.*' > all-deb-pkgs.txt

You can use 'dpkg --get-selections > dpkg-selections.txt' to get a look
at the selections file format... then add the needed packages to that
list and run 'dpkg --set-selections < dpkg-selections-new.txt'.  Then,
'apt-get dselect-upgrade' would pull them in.

If the needed set is small, that would be more trouble than it's worth,
and you're probably better off just searching them one-by-one with '/'
in aptitude, then selecting them with '+'.

If the machine will also serve as a desktop workstation, I suggest
Ubuntu.  Ubuntu makes a good server too, I gather, but if it was me I'd
probably stay with a more minimal Debian install for that.