Reloading user settings after a fresh reinstall

[O. Sinclair]

Larry Hartman wrote:
> The last time I installed Kubuntu I made sure that my /home directory was on a 
> separate partition.  I am thinking of reloading feisty as a fresh install, my 
> current load is twice upgraded.  I wish to do a fresh install of Kubuntu and 
> retain my user settings.  
> 
> Can someone give me some guidance or point me to forum entry, etc?  Would like 
> to have the general steps laid out for me.
> 
> 1.  Do I need to use the same username and password?
> 2.  Will I have trouble setting up KMail?

I can at least tell you what I did in the same situation. I gave up on 
the separate Home partition, there are times when eg a temp setting does 
not work as expected. Further I badly needed to weed files. NOT saying 
you either must or should, my method should work for you nevertheless. 
If you dont want to weed the Home partition just leave it unchanged and 
make sure it is mounted as /home and not formatted.

As for question 1) I would say yes unless you want headaches with 
file/user rights. There could be a tool out there to avoid this of course.

As for 2) I had no problems whatsoever but had to recreate Identities, 
accounts and filters. And one thing, a lot of mail comes up as Unread 
after putting back the backed up files. This might not apply at all if 
you leave Home untouched.

I used KBackup (found at kde-apps.org) to backup files. I made sure to 
mark hidden directories such as .kde or at least the subdirectories of 
this I figured might be important. Others will swear by Keep or Ark for 
backing up, I like KBackup. It's only drawbackup is that there is no 
Restore facility built-in but that was easily sorted with Ark and some 
checkin on the comments at kde-apps regarding KBackup.

Having done my backup and moved it off disk (in my case to a network 
server) I simply rebooted with a CD (in my case Alternate rather than 
Live), took a deep breath and repartioned the whole disk and reinstalled 
fresh. I made sure the swap was 2 * RAM, this cause I use a laptop and 
Hibernate won't work otherwise. I also used exactly the same hostname 
and username as before.

After that it was reinstalling some apps I consider mighty useful 
(Swiftfox etc) and then I restored my backed up files. KMail and Kopete 
came up with no major headaches (avoid saving .kopete directory, you 
only need to recreate your identities and your contacts should come back).

Much less trouble then I imagined to be honest once I got past a very 
irritating problem with the x-server not starting on my laptop.

Sinclair