Does anyone know the easiest way to copy one profile to another? I've been using this desktop system since Ubuntu 7.04 and I upgraded to 8.04 early last year; which brought likewise-open to the repositories. Now I've got this system authenticating against Active Directory and would like to use that account instead of the local account/profile. The problem is that I don't want to reconfigure a new profile.

What steps do I need to take to migrate my profile and settings from /home/username to /home/domain.local/username? Is it as simple as coping all of the files and directories including hidden files from /home/username to /home/domain.local/username and modifying the permissions accordingly or is there an easier/different method that should be used?

It should be as easy as that. As long as you adjust the ownership accordingly after that.

You could as well just tar everything up without preserving the ownerships (no -p), then restore it in your new account. I have no experience with activedirectory though, so meybe there's some specific thing about it that I am not taking into account.

Cool thanks for the reply, I'll give it a shot and let you know.

I think that you'll be fine if you set up a new account (in the usual way) with active-directory/LDAP, make sure it works, and then move the files from the old home to the new. Since the user-ID (number) and the group-id (number) of the old and the new account will be different, a chown -r command (carefully performed by root) will "bequeath" the files to the new user.

It is also possible to stipulate that the numeric user-ID and/or group-ID of the newly created user ought to be identical to that of the old. While this is usually not advised, if you know you're going to be zapping the old user-id anyway you can get away with it.

As always: review your strategy carefully, write down a list of what you're going to do, check it twice...