One of the areas with Feisty Fawn that I haven't yet covered on Phoronix, my blog, or the forums, is the new Ubuntu migration-assistant. This migration-assistant will be found in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and makes it easier to move your documents and settings over to Ubuntu from other operating systems. Switching Linux distributions can be a pain, but switching from Windows to Linux can be a disaster for most people. The Ubuntu migration-assistant hopes to lessen this impact by making the transfer of settings and files MUCH easier.

Ubuntu's migration-assistant is designed to help the user transport all of their documents/media and settings all over to a new Ubuntu installation. Among the areas being worked on for the migration-assistant is transporting instant messenger settings, bookmarks, address books, user accounts, e-mail messages, fonts, desktop backgrounds, and even Internet connection settings. For example, Windows' My Documents would automatically be transferred to say ~/Documents and music would be copied over and then set to be detected by Rhythmbox. If migration-assistant developers can really pull this off to the extent of passing Internet connection settings, this will be a miracle for new Linux users. In Feisty+1 they also hope to accomplish other advancements such as copying the backed up data over to external media and importing the transferred data to both KDE and GNOME.



After searching high and low I managed to find a system that had Windows XP installed. With Herd 5, migration-assistant can be found with the Ubiquity LiveCD installer to streamline the installation process. Ubuntu's migration-assistant had detected the Internet Explorer Settings, Wallpaper, User Picture, My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music. After selecting these items and hitting the forward button, Ubuntu had just sat there... Thirty minutes later it was still sitting there; obviously there are some kinks that need to be worked out with this new system.



Ubuntu's migration-assistant also doesn't work with other Linux distributions right now. I had tried importing documents and settings from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 into a new install of Herd 5, but migration-assistant had not detected anything. From a previous install of Fedora 7 Test 2, Ubuntu's migration-assistant also failed at detecting anything for transfer.



The intentions of this migration-assistant are truly great and other distributions need to jump on board (Fedora?). Once migration-assistant has matured a bit more, I will be sure to take another look at it. More information is available here and here.

If it's supposed to help to migrate documents and settings from Windows, why would write that it failed to get docs & settings from Fedora?

I believe you hit two bugs that were corrected in the latest version, which should be in tomorrow's daily LiveCD.

First, selecting an item to import should've automatically checked the user checkbox. Oddly enough, this was fixed the day after your blog post.

Second, migration-assistant probably didn't find your Fedora users because it did not support separate /home partitions when you tried it. This is one of the fixes that went into yesterday's release.

I encourage you to give it another shot when Ubuntu 7.04 Beta is released.

Thanks!

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