Thinking of jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon for a test drive around the country on a lovely Sunday morning...

anyway, as I am coming from MEPIS, will my User ID (uid) and Group ID (gid) be the same?

Can I opt to keep my home directory during the install of 5.10?

and expect to be able to access/write all files?

can I edit my fstab and expect it to work the same way?

by adding the KDE desktop, will the progs that come with it appear in the Gnome menus? or will I have to work a lot to make both menus somewhat similar and have progs appear on each from the other DE set?

thanks LQ'ers, this could save me some headaches.

Partitions: a partition is handled the same whichever distro you use, it is the kernel which handles all your hardware so, if anything, try to get the same kernel version running on both (2.4.** or 2.6.**).
The uid/gid is just a number, so you need to make sure your main user's uid/gid are the same in both systems - see /etc/passwd and /etc/group.
Different versions of gnome/kde may do things slightly differently and cause unwanted modifications to your ~/.kde and ~/.gconf and ~/.gnome2 folders when switching distros. Maybe you should share your home but use different desktop managers or uid's? just a thought.

The time that this (might) buy you in setting up the system you're test driving isn't worth it, IMO. As was mentioned, you may be clobbering settings from the install you're already happy with, and you will have to play around with UIDs / GIDs to get all your permissions in line.

But to each his own.

when installing ubuntu and create a temporary id during install and not the id you want to use.

once ubuntu is installed login with the temporary id you made, then goto System -> Admistration - >Users and Groups" and manually create your id with the id numbers you want just make the group first, incase you didn't know. just make sure you check the "Properties -> User Privileges" and give the same rights to your new id.

I'd keep the old id around just in case something doesn't work right. hope nothing blows up from you following this.....

[edit]
minor corrections...