So I was talking to Jarland yesterday about this, and I'd definitely would like it if he'd chip in and share his experience with this, but apparently you can change OSes via SSH. You basically end up loading the SSH daemon into RAM and the OS installation files and wipe the hard drive clean.

Another method is to just install the OS into a sub-directly from / and then redirecting everything to the sub-directory (kind of like an OS inside an OS).

For Any Distro of Linux to Debian, there's Debootstrap.

For Any Distro of Linux to FreeBSD, there's Depenguinator.

Anyone else tried this before? Any thoughts? I thought it was pretty interesting in general.

Here's the guide I followed to turn CentOS 6 into Debian 6, without IPMI or KVM.
http://daemonkeeper.net/668/how-to-boots...ux-system/

This looks mega useful.

@jarland, glanced the link you posted.

How bulletproof and quick to learn is this process?

This code is beta-quality at best. Do not use this unless you know what you're doing.
Note: This code only supports i386 systems, and it requires quite a lot of RAM (512MB is enough; 256MB might be, but I'm not sure).

So I guess YMMV?

(This post was last modified: 03-27-2013, 09:31 PM by zhuanyi.)

This looks mega useful.

@jarland, glanced the link you posted.

How bulletproof and quick to learn is this process?

Took me about an hour. It went alright but obviously one screw up and you need a KVM.

Encouraging. Always ask the man in the trenches with crap on his boots.

mind = blown

Weekend = over

Thanks = you