On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 20:36, Laurie Savage wrote: > > But I should have mentioned that > even if you keep user names the same, different distros presumably > allocate different UIDs to the users and so the ownership of home > directories becomes confused.
Redhat always made me uid=500, and Debian makes me uid=1000. During installs, there's always been a place where I can specify mount points, including for already initialized partitions, and I specify my existing /home partition then. I also create the named user account, same name as before, and don't concern myself about the uid. After rebooting, but before signing in as my user, I go in as root and do "cd /home; chown -R user.user user". I've gone both ways, and haven't lost anything I cared enough about to recall now. I haven't found anything this doesn't work for, but I'm running a personal system, so my experiments are limited. If I had a lot of users, I'd write a script that wrote out the account names and run it while things were working, so I'd have it against the day. Then I'd run another script that did the above off the list to restore them all. If the user data is kept somewhere as uid numbers, this would be more complicated, as those might change. I don't know of such, but there might be a volid reason I don't know of to do that, or just an unfortunate design decision. Cheers, Bret -- bwaldow at alum.mit.edu -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
