Reloading user settings after a fresh reinstall

[Derek Broughton]

O. Sinclair wrote:

> 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?

No.  but...  (I'll deal with the huge "but" below).

>> 2.  Will I have trouble setting up KMail?

No.
> 
> 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. 

I've been using separate home partitions for almost a decade.  I've never
seen a problem.  I can't even _imagine_ a problem, as Linux doesn't see the
difference between /home mounted as part of / or /home on a separate
partition.

> 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.

Here's the "but". The problem is that you need to create your users in
_exactly_ the order they were originally created.  Even if you use the same
name, the home directory won't be accessible unless it gets the same uid.
So your first user is 1000, the next is 1001.  Recreate them in that order
(or explictly provide uid's when you create them).  The password is
absolutely unimportant - that's stored on your (new) root filesystem.  The
name doesn't need to be the same, but if you use different names you either
need to rename the directories under /home to match the new names, or
modify the user's login home directories ("usermod" or System Settings) to
match the actual ones.  That's a headache.
> 
> 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.

You're right, it doesn't.
> 
> 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. 

KDar - I just hope it eventually makes it back into universe.  I had to grab
kdar from edgy and libdar* from dapper!

> I made sure the swap was 2 * RAM, this cause I use a laptop and
> Hibernate won't work otherwise.

I think that's more like "can't be guaranteed to work".  Generally hibernate
should toss pages that it can read back from the filesystem, so have plenty
of space even if you don't have 2*RAM available, but the less extra swap
you have the more likelihood of running into the problem.  I have very
nearly twice my RAM in swap, and once in a long while I find I have to
close something before I can hibernate.

> I also used exactly the same hostname and username as before.

Yes, I changed hostname once and it caused a couple of things to break.
-- 
derek