[techtalk] SuSE -> Mandrake?

[Linda Walsh]

I'm thinking I'd like to convert my mail server
and laptop from SuSE to Mandrake.  Mandrake has better/easier to use
configuration (chkconfig) and security settings/options.  It's also
compiled for 586's and above, yielding speed improvements.

So the big question is how do I do it.  I have partitions /tmp, /var, /home
(/usr/src is a softlink to inside /home), /boot and /.  

So it seems I have to worry primarily about "/" and "/var".

I sorta dread the idea of re-setting back up the mail stuff and host
configuration, but I'm sorta thinking I may have to scratch / and /var
because even an upgrade from RH61 (supposedly compatible) to MDK 7.0 resulted
in alot of services not coming up due to errors (including networking).  
Fortunately that was on a scratch machine, so I could just mkfs and 
start over; icky idea, though, on my mail, source and build machine.

I think one thing that pissed my off about SuSE was it's non-standard
setup stuff -- putting all the scripts under /sbin/rc.d instead of in
/etc.  But then, to make it worse, they have a README about their startup
philosophy that talked about 'init' being the *father* of all processes.
I've always called it the parent process -- assigning a gender to a process
just seems downright silly -- processes use fission to reproduce.  It's 
an asexual process.  Anyway, the father thing bugged me. 

Ideas on conversion?  There is a linux filesystem hierarchy standard and
I'll just bet SuSE doesn't conform.

thanks,
-linda

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