Migrating From SuSE to (K)Ubuntu

[Al Gordon]

On 12/2/05, Hodgins Family <ehodgins at telusplanet.net> wrote:
> Good morning!
>
> >I have friend who is running one of the later SuSE distros who is
> >interested in switching to Ubuntu/kubuntu-desktop.  He wants to keep
> >his home directory intact, but is concerned that the various config
> >files that come with kubuntu-desktop aren't going to be 100%
> >compatible with what he currently has.  I think that this is a valid
> >concern, since I did a similar setup for someone else recently, and
> >the Ubuntu KDE environment looked like total crap with the SuSE KDE
> >settings that were in that user's home directory.  Fonts were shot,
> >the background images obviously didn't work, etc.
>
> 1) Copy all the config files that are in the home directory to a new folder
> (/home/myfriend/SUSEconfig_files). These are for a "just in case they are
> needed later". You might want to consider copying files out of /etc as
> well -- just in case!
> 2) Copy the entire /home/myfriend folder elsewhere (CD, DVD, network to
> other computer). This is just to keep the personal files intact
> 3) Either i) install Ubuntu, formatting the whole drive along the way --
> blowing away the /home along with everything else OR ii) if the home is on
> another partition get rid of the SUSE config files in the home directory
> (leave the files that you copied into /home/myfriend/SUSEconfig_files alone)
> and then install Ubuntu without letting it create a second /home partition.
> 4) Clean up by getting the personal files back onto the hard drive and
> decide what config files in the /home/myfriend/SUSEconfig_files can be
> dumped/reused, etc.
>
> HTH
>
> Rob

Thanks to all who responded.  I did the migration today, and things
worked out more or less alright.  The user's home directory was NFS
mounted from a file server, so that part wasn't so bad.  We made a
backup of it regardless, just in case we wanted to get back to a
pristine state.

The only thing that seemed to not be the greatest was the look&feel
after doing the migration.  The fonts and desktop background needed
manual tweaking, and a few shortcut (*.desktop files) needed to be
recreated.  But other than that, the various Ubuntu KDE apps seemed to
behave well with the config and environment files from the previous
SuSE install.

--

  -- AL --