I have successfully completed a transition from mythbuntu to LinHES R8. There were a couple of difficulties, so I'm reporting here to help anybody else who might want to go through it.
Initial configuration was a mythbuntu installation on a 60GB SSD. Two partitions, one /, the other swap. Three large hard drives provided recording space on sdb, sdc, and sdd.
I downloaded R8-02-11-2013.iso and burned a CD.
After performing a complete backup, I booted the CD. I was offered the choice between upgrading and installing. I figured that the 'upgrade' option wouldn't work very well when faced with a completely different distribution, so I tried the install. It wanted me to create multiple partitions, one for /, one for /home, one for the database, and one for the recordings. I figured I could start from there, and then tweak the configuration manually. I realized, however, that there were limits on how large I could make /, and on how small I could make the recordings directory. Since I wasn't planning on using a recordings directory on the SSD, I thought I'd try to see what the upgrade option did.
I switched to the upgrade option. It warned me that it couldn't figure out the previous version, and then I gave it permission to keep going. It claimed to perform the install, but when I booted the box, it immediately powered itself down. Using the boot CD, I edited the grub configuration to turn off the splash and get verbose kernel output. Things still went by very quickly and then the computer turned off, so I used my cellphone to take video of the bootup screen and was able to read what was there just before it went away. The files /etc/runit/1, /etc/runit/2, and /etc/runit/3 were not present, which is a fatal error for runit, and causes it to invoke a powerdown. This is probably because of the unexpected "upgrade" starting point.
So, next, I used the boot CD, and I blanked the SSD so that there would be no confusion. I told it to do a fresh install. Once that completed, I used the boot CD to start inspecting what was there. I copied all of the files from the 3 partitions (/ /home db) into a file tree in a directory on one of my big hard drives. Then I used fdisk to repartition sda into two partitions again (I know the database ought to go in its own partition, but at this point I didn't want to try anything too challenging). I formatted one for ext3, the other for swap. Then I edited the fstab, removing the mount commands for /home, the database, and the media drive, and adjusting the UUIDs appropriately, as I had reformatted / and swap. Then I put in the fstab entries for the 3 large hard drives from the backup's version of fstab. I also deleted the symbolic link at /myth and replaced it with a directory, as that is the mount point for one of my large hard drives.
After this, I was able to reboot into the LinHES installation on the SSD. I chown-ed some files that had different UIDs between mythbuntu and LinHES, and did a few little tweaks and fixups related to my personal customizations. The system can now make play and make recordings.
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