Good distro to move from one system to another?

T

tom61

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 3, 2001
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I have a system that doesn't have a cdrom (44-pin IDE), that I'd like to install Linux to a harddrive via my main system(using an adapter), then just hook up the drive to the second system (very little in common between them).

The first distro I tried, Ubuntu didn't work (kernel panics because it can't find the IDE hardware).

I was thinking Mandrivia, but I just moved an old Mandrake HD to yet another system (this HD has been in many different systems without re-installing) and it wanted the first install disc. That wouldn't work too well on my other system, as I don't have adapters for both the HD and CDrom to work at the same time.

I'd perfer something easy to install.

Thanks for any help.
 
tom61 said:
I have a system that doesn't have a cdrom (44-pin IDE), that I'd like to install Linux to a harddrive via my main system(using an adapter), then just hook up the drive to the second system (very little in common between them).

The first distro I tried, Ubuntu didn't work (kernel panics because it can't find the IDE hardware).

I was thinking Mandrivia, but I just moved an old Mandrake HD to yet another system (this HD has been in many different systems without re-installing) and it wanted the first install disc. That wouldn't work too well on my other system, as I don't have adapters for both the HD and CDrom to work at the same time.

I'd perfer something easy to install.

Thanks for any help.
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Gentoo will. You can compile for i386, and put it in most any x86 machine. You'll just have to compile the kernel correctly for the target machine.
 
thats the only thing that was causing ubuntu to crap out was the IDE interfaces. Make a rescue floppy and re-configure your system to use the new IDE instead of the old one. Both/all should work fine.
 
You should have that problem with most any distribution because they all pretty much use the same underlying software. It is easy enough to get working, though, but it does take a bit of foresight. Install linux on the one system, but don't take the hard drive out yet. Once you get linux installed, change your configurations(bootloader and fstab are the two that come to mind right now) to point to whatever that hard drive is going to be in the other computer. Depending on how modular the installed kernel is you might not have to recompile your kernel. If there isn't a module for the other hard drive controller and the driver isn't compiled in then you will have to take care of that. You'll also have to account for other hardware differences.

I suppose you could conceivably create a partition on the hard drive and write a linux cdrom image to it, then install from that. That might work. It seems like it would be easier to just change a few configs like I mentioned above, though.
 
FreeBSD works rather well. If it doesn't find it's root partition, it prompts you for it, and the bootloader is non-configurable and fully automatic.
 
Most any out-of-the-box distribution can be moved from machine to machine with minimal headache. If you build an uber-optimized Gentoo install (or anything you can rebuild the entire system in) that only runs on certain CPUs of certain arches then you might run in to trouble, but otherwise you shouldn't have too many problems.
 
I don't really want to run Gentoo on this box, as I've had trouble with binary emerges, and it's really not beefy enough to handle compiles on its own. I may have to setup a chroot environment and just emerge and compile everything I need with march=i686. Not sure what use flags for the C3 I'm using are.

No floppy on my main rig. I'm not even sure I have a functional drive laying around.

Tried with a highly modular kernel, it started loading, but failed after freeing some memory. There's bound to be a way to run a CD image from HD, but I haven't figured it out.

I might try FreeBSD, if my current Linux attempts fail.

It only becomes 'too many troubles' when you don't have any easily usable removable media on the second box.


Right now I'm trying to get Damn Small Linux installed to a thumbdrive (the only removable drive that can be used on both systems easily), but having trouble with a missing command 'rotdash'. I can't find it in Gentoo's Portage, and Knoppix doesn't have it. I'm going to try the bootable CD of DSL to see if it has all the needed commands.
 
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