Migrating from Windows to Linux made easy

[greg.rundlett at gmail.com (Greg Rundlett)]

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away.....

OK, it was 2000AD, in Lawrence, MA.

We created a product that would migrate various applications, files
and 'personalization' settings from one flavor of Windows to another. 
It was a real neat product for anyone who ever came near a computer. 
Great for users to upgrade to a new system, but have it feel 'just
like home'.  Great for system administrators (or the neighborhood
geek) who has to deal with migrating/upgrading other peoples'
computers.  Great for companies who often have to do lots of this
stuff because the process can be expensive in so many ways.  Great for
manufacturers (lower barriers to upgrade).

The company won "Best New Enterprise Product COMDEX Fall 2000", got
pirated/squashed by Microsoft, went belly up and sold the technology
to Symantec -  who still offers the product in their enterprise
products.

To bring this thread on-topic... I always dreamed of making the thing
work for migrations from Windows to Linux.

Fastforward to today.  I just came across a post in a Georgia LUG
website to a company in the UK that apparently does this now.  For
next to nothing ($10)
http://www.resolvo.com/products/moveover/index.htm  The really strange
thing (or not) is that the flash demo looks /awfully/ similar to the
product GUI that we developed -- making me think that they've simply
built upon the codebase we started.  I'll have to check out the code,
because it is at least partly open source
http://openmoveover.sourceforge.net/

I have not tried it, so I can't say how polished it is, but by the
looks of it it's got the basics covered.  At $10 it's hard to make a
case for NOT using such a tool the next time you have to assist a
friend over from the dark side.  And actually it looks like there is a
free as in beer option too.

Sadly, upon closer inspection, there doesn't seem to be much code in
the open source project.  There haven't been any updates since the
code was originally posted 7-9 months ago, and their product lists FC2
and Suse 9 support (old).  I wonder if SUSE or anyone might start to
kick some life into this?