At Sun, 4 Jan 2004 14:25:24 -0800 , Carl Youngblood wrote: > Sorry if this question is rather basic. I'm interested in hearing > others' ideas about how best to seamlessly change from one version of > linux to another. Where do you keep your personal files and > configurations (i.e. do you put your /home on another partition?) and > how can you make it as painless as possible to do a fresh install of a > new version of linux (such as fedora) without losing any settings or > personal data? I would also be interested in hearing others' ideas > about the best way to keep a roaming profile so you can quickly sync > files and settings between different linux boxes. >
I had to switch from Mandrake to Redhat at work. My home directory was on an NFS server, so I just did a total wipe and reload to make the switch. It went pretty smoothly except my gnome menus were completely empty when I started Redhat. All my other customizations pretty much survived the switch. To fix the menus I think I just deleted everything .gnome* in my home directory and logged out and back in again. This gave me the Redhat defaults. You could achieve the same thing by keeping /home on a separate partition and making sure you don't format that partition when you load a new version of Linux on your machine. As far as roaming profiles, I think the NFS server for user data (home directories), and authentication through NIS is pretty much how this is done in unix land. All personal settings are kept in your home directory, so this is really all it takes (kind of, as long as you log into the same version and distro of Linux on all your different linux boxes, otherwise there could be some incompatibilities). I don't know if you understand NFS or NIS, so if you want more details just ask (or go look it up on the web, lazy :) Bryan ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
