There’s a program built in to almost all distros that is equivalent to the Files & Settings Transfer Wizard in Windows, but nothing I am aware of that will port your apps over. Things like emails, contacts, bookmarks, favorites, etc however will move over with ease.
Okay, I tried PILinux2007 in another virtual machine and am very impressed! Setting up my network printer was completely automatic and considerably easier then Ubuntu. It’s nicely configured and I’m finding little that needs tweaking.
I wasn’t able to find a migration utility like the one you said comes in every distro, but there’s a nice add-on to Thunderbird that exports your emails and keeps your folder structure intact. I used that to pull my emails over to the PCLinux2007. Setting up the actual accounts was a manual chore but took no more than 5 minutes.
After a day of playing with it, I’m finding things are more stable than in my Ubuntu installation. Thunderbird has yet to crash, though it would do so a few times a day in Ubuntu. Now, I’d changed Ubuntu to Kubuntu by downloading various KDE thingies, and maybe that contributed to the occasional whoops there. But the fact is, I was trying to make Ubuntu look and feel like PCLinux2007 looks and feels in its standard configuration. Fonts, decoration, window behavior... you name it, it’s nicely set up and intuitive to use, and rather pretty. So now I’ve switched.
Thanks for the recommendation!
(I love FR!)
And furthermore: My sons both have rather old but still solid Win98 and WinME (yecch) Sony laptops that they’re no longer using, having gone to Macs a couple years ago (and wonderful machines those are). They wanted to try Linux, but I could not get Ubuntu to install on those machines. From my research today, I learned that Ubuntu is hard-core into open-source, and everything in it is open-source, and that’s lovely, but if your video card (for example) is only supported by a proprietary driver, well then you’re just S.O.L. as far as Ubuntu is concerned. PCLinux2007 has no such philosophical aversion to deploying closed-source drivers when needed. Bottom line: the boys’ old laptops now sport fresh, shiny new Linux OSes!