[SWLUG] Changing to a new distro

[Neil Greenwood]

On 19/03/07, Dick Bain <dick.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> You could do that but it shouldn't be necessary, just make sure that
> fedora knows which partition is which ;-)
> Oh and don't use exactly the same user name so that you don't use the
> suse configuration files that will be in your original /home directory
> when booting into the new distro.

This is quite important, not just from a configuration point of view,
but also because different distros assign user IDs and group IDs
differently.

I've heard of someone trying to share /home with a new distro and
getting lots of errors because the new distro couldn't create the
configuration files/directories it needed to - they already existed
but were owned by 'someone else' (same username, different user ID)
and weren't writable.

I think it was a problem with Mandriva and Ubuntu, but theoretically
it can happen with any combination. Better to use a different username
so that ~ is a different directory.


Hwyl,
Neil.