Distro overwrite?
 

Hi
I have been using Mepis for a long time but in the last year I have had a great deal of trouble with Firefox(crashing/Freezing) Adobe Flashplayer; I have the latest version; and various iplayers. In the BBC iplayer the colours are all wrong. While all this has nothing to do with Mepis I feel and change will be better. My PC is devided into SB1 = Mepis, SB2 =swap and SB3 =Home.

I want to load the latest version of Mint into SB1 and keep everything else as it is. I am sure this is possible but I would just like confirmation before I proceed.

Thanks

Keeping /home across distros is fraught with trouble. Especially when you are having application issues anyway. Keep the data, lose all the (hidden) profile files, and allow the new install to create them clean.
Keep a general backup of course, and before you start trashing stuff, backup/export what you want from within each app - say F/F bookmarks, and email - that sort of thing.

As for swap, the install will run a mkswap on that, which is a good thing.

Laziest way: Just don't format your /home partition (SB3) during installation and you'll be fine. During setup choose a different username for your account; that way you'll end up with two folders in /home: your current Mint account and the old one from Mepis. All you'll have to do then is to copy your datafiles from the old user folder to the current one.

Distro Overwrite
 

Thanks

Extrememly grateful for your replies. I thoght I could do this but just checking

grabro

Have you ensured that your version of Flash is up to date? A silly question, perhaps, but Flash may require a manual update process in Mepis as it does in Debian if the deb-multimedia repositories are used.
That said, a reinstall isn't a bad idea even using Linux. I'd be cheeky enough to suggest keeping the /home partition and username then just prepending the directories in there with an underscore, or some such, if you have issues. I agree that moving a home partition from one distribution to another can break a lot but I have found that it's not necessarily any more time consuming than re-creating all your settings.

:D
Unfortunately my muscle-memory is such that I always login to the same user when I sit down at a machine. I would be swearing in no time ... :p

Why are you posting a software issue on a hardware forum?

If you install Linux Mint onto the Mepis partition, then your home directory (SB3 Home) won't be part of Linux Mint.

Before you proceed, copy everything in SB3 Home onto a USB or separate drive.
That way, you won't lose your personal files.

Then give details about your computer hardware so people can see what many or few options you have with Linux Mint.