Hi all

I am running FC5 64 bit and want to upgrade to FC6 or maybe clean install of FC6. If I do a clean install of FC6 can I copy my backed up /home directory from FC5 onto the new install of FC6 so I dont have to setup all the users settings, themes, screensavers and all that stuff. Sort of why I was looking at an upgrade instead of a clean install if I have to go through all this hassle again.

Look forward to your comments and experiance on this

Cheers

Gimmee

From the FC6 CD, you can do an upgrade instead of a clean installation. I don't know how good it is these days, but in the long distant past I had problems (RH8 - RH9, so the problem I had may be fixed now). I think you can upgrade using Yum - try "yum upgrade". Search Google for more on this.

For future use, you can create a separate partition for /home. This will survive upgrades, and even distribution changes. You just have to tell the distro's installer to use that partition for /home.

I hope this helps
--Ian

Hi there

Yeah I found a couple of good posts on upgrading from FC5 to FC6 and have backed everything important up and are upgrading now but also downloading the DVD FC6 64 bit iso just incase. I have a separate /home partition so will keep that in mind what you have said.

Thanks heaps

gimmee

You could also try setting up a custom partition scheme. It's one of the options in the graphical installation screens early on in the process. If you do so, you can merely rename your FC5 /home directory as /home again in FC6, then tell FC6 which other partitions you want to format. Just remember that you have to edit each of the partitions, including any of Windows if you dual-boot to re-establish their mount-point names, or they won't be automatically entered into the new fstab.

Don't format the /home partition or Windows partitions. Your /home data will remain intact. I suppose it might be possible to have some issues with user settings for some programs, but I haven't experienced any - and I've kept the same /home partition since FC3.

Of course, this last time, I lost my guest partitions...

I believe based on experience, you will need to create a new user, let's say you use KDE, if you upgraded KDE to version 3.5.4 in your FC5, than yes, you will be able to use the same user thus keep all settings as FC6 comes with KDE 3.5.4. If you did not upgrade and you are going from one version to another there is a good chance you won't be able to log in as your original user because settings from one version don't work with another. I have a multi-boot system and tried using the same user as Mandrake 10.2 when installing FC6 and got kicked back to log in screen and had to log in as root in FC6, and create new user. Then when I booted up Mandrake which was set to bypass log in screen and open straight to user account, it would freeze at the splash just before KDE starts. So I ended up wiping the Partition Mandrake was in and re-building from scratch because it was set to boot into that users session whose KDE settings were hooped.

No matter how comfortable it sounds i personally advise against using the same /home from one version to another. Besides what's the big deal in customising themes and stuff again? I certainly don't consider it a hassle. I love it. Your preference may vary.

Well, in a multi-boot system like the ones I have with up to six operating systems on a 30GB HDD, I would have no room to store any data withing a linux partition if I had to create six home partitions to accommodate each one, I also have an 80GB slave drive formatted vfat32 for data accessible by all six operating systems which can include three Windows systems depending on what day it is. But I need a linux ex2 or ex3 filesystem for some distros that won't let me do certain things within the vfat32 drive even with full permission and full ownership (older distro). So with one swap partition and a small /home partition and six operating system partitions with a minimum of 15 percent free space in Windows for defragmenting, I don't have much choice, that's eight partitions already, sure my boot manager will allow me to create up to 200 partitions but I only have 30GB. And some of those distros were temporarily removed to load a compressed image of yet a number of other previously installed OS's when I need to get to know something about it or whatever,(only takes a few minutes to erase one and load another in it's space). And every single one of them uses that one /home partition without any problems.

On what grounds do you "advise against using the same /home from one version to another"?
Why?

I have been having the devil's own time trying to get write access to a /data partition (extended partition in the Windows side of the computer) to all the accounts I have on my 80 GB drive since the inception of FC5. Because of this, the files created by the users are scattered in each of the accounts. The prospect of the joys associated with backing up, then recreating the data, re-setting permissions, etc., - all across several accounts - has led me to continue use of the existing home partition. IF I could figure out how to give write access to /data, I could set it up for the various users and have only one thing to back up. Then I would whole-heartedly establish a new /home partition.

I have found that I could consistently create my main user account in the installation GUI with the same username and password without loss of data.

Its not so much the loss of data, but conflicts between config files. Gnome is particularly bad at this.

marv - what problem are you having getting write access to your /data partition?
Make sure that in /etc/fstab you specify "defaults" for /data, which should include rw access. Mount the drive, and then as root change the ownership and group of /data to your user, and the permissions to rwx for your user and nothing for everyone else.
This will give your normal user full access to /data, and deny everyone else.
Otherwise, give us more info of what you are doing, and I can help some more.

--Ian

This is wandering a little from the original thread, for which I apologize.

What I am trying to do is set up a read/write partition that all user accounts on my machine can use as a common shared resource. Eventually, I would like to set up that kind of partition on my small LAN server.

In FC4, I was able to successfully set up a /data partition with the chmod command, and permissions set for read, write, but not execute. In FC5 and FC6, I have not been able to effect the change. I have tried the GUI, as root and su, to change permissions for all users - I could change them, but they defaulted to read only. I tried using chmod, both directly as root and through su - but they defaulted to read only. I tried changing the fstab entry as su - but it defaulted to read only.

I strongly suspect that there is some 'magic' command buried deep within SELinux that will allow me to do what I want to do, but have been unable to find it. Because I did have my common /data partition as read/write/no execute up through FC4, all with various versions of SELinux, but chmod still worked on my partitions.

Anyway, that's what I trying to do. Unfortunately, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with whether I've maintained my home partition since FC4 - or I'd back up my /home data and reload FC6 in a New York minute.

Thanks for bearing with me,

It could be to do with SELinux - I don't know anything about this though, so you are own your own with this bit

I think there is a GUI SELinux config utility though - have a look in the Gnome menus.

Make sure that your mount point /data has the correct permissions when /data is mounted - try changing the permissions and ownership of /data as appropriate.

--Ian

Thanks. I'll keep flogging.