When I reinstall my distro (MEPIS, for the last 2.5 years), making my new user account preserve all the old account's settings has always been a difficult and very messy process, especially if I have installed a new copy on another partition. (I'm doing that soon, so I have this copy as a backup until I have everything the way I want it on the new copy.) Most of my stuff gets saved, but not everything. The biggest problem is that, even if I select "preserve data in /home" in the MEPIS installer, my keyboard shortcuts become unusable (not completely erased) under odd circumstances. They're still listed in file /home/josh/kde/share/config/khotkeysrc, but they still can't be used, and I have to open hhotkeysrc and manually delete them and then reenter them in the menu editor (the K menu, by the way, gets completely overwritten).

I can't just overwrite the entire new user account with the old one; I've tried, and something goes wrong so that the new account can't be opened (probably because some important files are inaccessible--I can't tell which ones or why they become inaccessible).


Anyway, is there a program that can preserve all the user account settings neatly for a new installation of the distro? I am supposing there is a program or at least a method, because I never hear others complaining about this problem. I probably don't know something I should know.

I had similar problems when I started using Linux ten years ago. After a couple of years of mistakes, I eventually had my problems worked out, and haven't had a repeat of them since then.

1) Always make a backup of /home before making a new installation.

2) Make a separate partition for /home.

3) Copy or move all /home subdirectories to the new partition. Then unmount the new partition.

4) During installation of Linux, ignore that new /home partition. Pretend it doesn't exist. Let the new installation create a /home directory with a new /<user> subdirectory under the root directory tree.

5) When installation is complete, and before rebooting, su to root and edit /etc/fstab to add the new /home partition with mount point /home: example: /dev/sda5 /home <mount options>

6) While still root, delete the <user> subdirectory under /home in the new installation. That will leave /home as as empty directory.

7) Now reboot. On reboot, the entry in /etc/fstab will cause the new /home partition (with all permissions, preferences, etc.) preserved, and mounted in /home.

No wonder I couldn't get a new installation to use the separate /home partition--I put the /home specification in the wrong place. I tried putting "home=/dev/sda6" at the end of the line in menu.lst for grub. That was just a guess.

Is this correct, then? Is /home in the correct spot?

No, that is showing two mount points which is wrong. Only one mount point should be assigned:Be awarw that the "users" is not needed and could allow other users to unmount that partition and make changes to it.

Tom

But I'm the only user.