I'm switching my blog over to a new machine and I'm trying to ponder out how to go about it the easiest and best way.

My current system is using mysql running on Win2k. The new system is gonna be on mysql under slackware linux. Both systems are running under Apache as well.

What should I do about moving over my data? I've not tried this before so I'm a bit concerned over losing what entries I've made so far. Has anyoone tried this before or can offer some insight?

Migrating MT when you are using MySQL as a backend is a piece of cake, compared to migrating a Berkeley DB install.

Here's a rough outline of the steps you'll take:

1) Export ("dump") the database on your current server.
2) Install MT on the new server, DO NOT run mt-load.cgi.
3) Import the database from your old server to an empty database on your new server. Make sure to setup the MySQL configuration settings in mt.cfg.
4) Go to mt.cgi and login with the same username and password that you used on your old install.
5) Go to Weblog Config for each of your blog(s) and update the paths for MT to publish to.
6) Rebuild.

Does that help?

This is another method which I have used successfully

[*]Shutdown the MySQL server on the Windows and Linux box

[*]copy/FTP/sneakernet the database files from the MySQL data directory to the MySQL data directory on your Linux box

[*]Start up the MySQL server on the Linux box

[*]Check and test the data integrity of the databases you just transferred using your favourite MySQL client

[*]Blog
Both methods will work, although importing an SQL DB dump is probably the safer way to go.