[ubuntu-uk] copying data from one PC to another PC

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 20/05/12 22:40, Carlos @ FOSSBOX wrote:

> For all the Ubuntu UK list... Does anybody know a link or how do I go
> about creating the users again? I was told that I they have to be
> created in the same order they where on the older system! I guess this
> only applies if I want to keep home partition unformatted.

Not quite.

When a user is created, they are assigned (by default) a user id and a 
group id. These are numbers. On Ubuntu they start at 1000 and go up. Go 
into a user's home dir and type ls -n (It will list contents showing 
user and group IDs rather than names.)

You have two choices as far as I can see:

* create the users in whatever order you like and simply "chown" the 
data you copy over for them to the new user (this will change the id to 
whatever it is for say user fred).

* look in /etc/passwd, and optionally /etc/group, and get the id numbers 
for each user and their group. Then create the users on your new machine 
specifying their old group and user ids (obviously checking that there 
are no conflicts with whatever is already present on your new system 
first). See "man adduser" and/or "man useradd" for more details on the 
options.

HTH

Al

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