Earlier this month I covered Ubuntu's Migration Assistant, which is one of the features that will be found in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The migration-assistant is designed to make it very easy for Microsoft Windows converts to jump into the Ubuntu world by automatically transferring files and settings. However, when I originally tried out Ubuntu migration-assistant I had run into a few bugs that ultimately rendered the assistant useless. However, in that post Evan had commented that the two major bugs being recently corrected, so this morning I gave this installation assistant another shot.

If you had missed my original blog entry, migration-assistant is automatically run during the Ubuntu installation process from its LiveCD. Microsoft Windows is not the only operating system supported, but you can automatically transport the files and settings from a previous Ubuntu installation or other Linux distributions. I have detailed the workings of migration-assistant a lot more in my original post. A working copy of migration-assistant is available through the daily LiveCD builds of Ubuntu and will also be available in the beta release of Ubuntu 7.04.

When reaching the "Migrate Document and Settings" portion of the install process, attached hard drive(s) will be scanned for supported operating systems to transfer files and settings from. When transferring from Windows XP Professional, the options were Internet Explorer, Wallpaper, User picture, My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures. A new user account also needs to be created for the Ubuntu installation as the destination directory of where these files and settings will be transferred.

With Ubuntu Migration Assistant now functioning, I selected all available items and then continued with the Feisty Fawn daily installation. I was using a daily build of Feisty Fawn that was marked 20060316.1. After completing the installation, rebooting, and logging in to the new transported user account, I was presented with the below configuration.

The migration assistant had worked! As you can see, the Windows installation on the test PC really didn't get much usage from me, so the default Windows XP wallpaper (teletubby hill) was transfered to Ubuntu.

Next I had navigated to ~/Documents using Nautilus and sure enough, Microsoft's My Documents had transferred over (a couple things from TurboTax).

Finally, launching Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and checking out the bookmarks, all of the bookmarks (well, the default Windows ones as I had never touched them) were all transfered successfully from Internet Explorer 6.0. Ubuntu's Migration Assistant had worked in transferring everything over and nothing was lost in the process.

With Ubuntu installed to the hard disk, I proceeded to re-run the Ubuntu LiveCD to see if migration-assistant would recognize the Ubuntu account that evolved from the Windows installation. Sure enough, presented in Migrate Documents and Settings was "michael Ubuntu feisty (development branch) (7.04) (sdb1)." However, the only thing available for transporting was the Mozilla Firefox settings.

I had popped the Ubuntu daily LiveCD into a Fedora Core 6 machine, but migration-assistant hadn't detected anything for transfer. Another thing I had noted when having Windows XP on one disk and Ubuntu on another disk in the system, the documents and settings couldn't be transferred from two sources, but only Ubuntu was listed at that point.

There are still bugs to be worked out and other features to be added, but Ubuntu Migration Assistant is looking great!

The migration does not cover email and I am sure that is more important to most Windows converts than their wallpaper.

Congrats to the development team i would like to see that on other distos too!

"Skype and Picasa are prime examples of programs that all Windows-users I know of does not want to leave."

...and these are both available for Linux, so your point is...?

I really need to test this because this feature can be a major break-trough in making people to switch from Windows to Ubuntu!
What I would like to see to be included:
-Detect the programs that where installed on their windows XP and propose an alternative. The website Open Source Alternative (http://www.osalt.com/) can be used for this. The Migration Assistant can also present a description for each program.
-Automatic Mail transfer (support needed for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird)
-Bookmark transfer from Firefox (I don't know if this feature is implemented.
-Transfer the user desktop (not only the images but also the documents and shortcuts)

That's great, Methodguy, you're retarded. Are you proud of yourself now? =3

Cool little program :-) I wish there had been something similar in Edgy when I moved my stuff over from one OS to the other. A great program to bring even more people over from Windows. Bravo to the devs!

Most of 'converters' will be dual-booting, so they will end up with two copies of their documents, one on each system partition. I think that's a waste of space, it should somehow link to your actual My Documents if you're going to dual.boot.

@Vivek

At this time I do not believe the migration-assistant is part of the alternate CD. Also, for Feisty Fawn it doesn't look it will support migrating those settings except for what I had mentioned in the original post. However, it should in 7.10 Feisty+1

This is awesome! All they need now is that app mentioned above to install similar programs and DX9 support ; ). If you could install games off the shelf and they just worked you guys would be all set. Perhaps the Cedega team could help with that.

This is a brilliant effort. Quite at the nascent stage though but i am sure this is moving in the right direction. No migration program to my knowledge is perfect. there will be some give and take in the process. Gliches apart, eventually, it makes it much easier to switch. does n't it.

Developers! you rock.