Ok so here's the situation:
I'm currently running Mandrake 10.1. I am planning on switching to Ubuntu, and I'm quite sure that when I go to install it, I will be able to clear of my hard drive, but there are some files I have that I'd like to keep (and are too big to burn).
My partitions are:
/
swap
and /home
/home/username/Files is where the files are.
I'd hope that I can clear of everything, so it's as though I have a fresh Ubuntu installation, and I copied those files from another computer to my /home/newusername/files directory.
Is this easy to do, or are those files going to have to go?

You can keep your /home folder if you don't format the partition. Just delete all /home/*/.* according to what you don't need or will cause trouble (.kde* etc...)

you can put your files in home folder and they won't be deleted if you have an amount of your hard drive formated as /home that means if you have partition formated independently and mounted as /home

Thanks for the replies, I was hoping that would work. How should I go about deleting all the /home/usrename/.* folders? I wouldn't think I can do them while logged into MDK.
I have a Knoppix CD so could I run that, delete all the .*'s and then reboot with the Ubuntu CD?
Again, thanks for your help!

The way I see it is two ways.
a.) when you install ubuntu, don't mount the /home partition, and have ubuntu put all of your user files in the / partition (for ubuntu)... save the files, wipe the partition, then edit the fstab.

or

b.) you can use the same /home partition if you create a user with a different name.