I want to move my /home directory to a new computer ("NEW") from my old workhorse ("OLD") which is having intermittent hardware problems losing connectivity (ethernet port stops working).

Both computers are running Ubunutu 10.04, but this may not be significant since the guidance I am trying to follow, i.e.,

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11865.html

is for the command line. This article was written in 2005, but is the most clearly written and complete set of instructions I have found and since it is all command line, I am assuming that the syntax is still applicable?

Unfortunately I am rather "command line challenged" and suspect that the difficulties that I am having are consequent to this, and hope someone will hold my hand.

I have gotten as far as

creating the tarball of /home on the old computer (it is in the /home directory of OLD and is 20G's in size-see post: "Huge tarball-what gives?" also in Linux-Newbie) and am ready to move it to NEW (for the moment, I have connectivity between the two computers). I can ping NEW from OLD but run into a problem trying to transfer the file from OLD to NEW.

When I give the command (while in OLD):

"scp home.tar.gz root@192.168.0.104:" (as shown in the above-referenced article

it returns

"home@192.168.0.104's password:"

I enter the password and it returns

"Permission denied. Please try again."

The thing is that I am absolutely sure that I am entering the correct password (and have repeated my attempt several times.) The username is the same on both computers and the password is the same on both computers.

So I expect that there is some sort of permission problem or addressing problem in my syntax or I am in the wrong directory in one or both computers. (I am in the /home directory of both). Can anyone see anything in the above that I am doing wrong? or have any suggestions or questions?

I really am a complete beginner at the command line, so please take into account in your reply. Thanks.

You input the following command:
scp home.tar.gz root@192.168.0.104:"

The user of 192.168.0.104 is root.

And What user's password you input?

I am the only user of this computer and AFAIK I am root (which I get to using SUDO).

How do I check to see if the password that I use for myusername works as root?

P.S. You might want to have a quick read through the article that I mentioned at novell.com. About halfway through is where I found that command.

Probably 192.168.0.104 is configured to disallow scp for root. Changing root in root@192.168.0.104 to your personal user name will likely solve the problem.

Catkin,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I am a total beginner and do not know how to do that.

Could I instead scp to myusername and then move it out of /home to unzip it?

You can scp in either direction. This is the syntax that works for me.

To scp a file FROM one computer to another:

To scp TO one computer from another:

At this point the need is to get home.tar.gz onto the new computer. Once it is there you can easily move it where the procedure requires it. You just have to change the /root in mv /root/home.tar.gz /home accordingly.

For example, if your personal user name on the new computer is Odyssey1942, then on the old computer you run
and on the new computer, using sudo to gain root privileges

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That was it. By sending it to my username instead of root on NEW, it is now busy transferring files from OLD to NEW.

However, I now need to know if I am actually accomplishing anything. Could I please refer you to the post:

also in Linux-Newbie, and ask for your thoughts on this. I may be sending gibberish to NEW.

Many thanks.

I do have a couple of other question regarding the move command on NEW.

Can I also do this from Gnome instead of the command line or is this going to cause problems with open files etc?

If better from the command line, do I need to rename or move the current /home directory first so that I can recover in the event that the tarball is gibberish? Any place I should (or should not) move the current /home to?

Thanks.

It needs root privilegess so probably easier to do at the command prompt.

With root privileges you could move /home to /home.aside (actually a rename but the mv command is used) and then mkdir /home. If the new /home does not have the same owner, group and permissions as the old you can (again with root privileges) use the chown and chmod commands to change as required.

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In my new computer used ctrl-alt-f1 to get to the console at the login screen.

In /home exists /username with the tarball from the old computer in it. So I have renamed /username as /usernameold so that I will have it in case something goes very wrong with the unpack.

This O/S is a new install although it had been used for testing to be sure that everything (including internet and browsers)works correctly. Can I just move the tarball to /home and if I unpack the tarball from there, will it set up /username?

Otherwise how do I ensure a minimum of conflicts or other problems when I unpack the tarball? Thanks.

If you created the tarball in the way shown in the procedure linked in the OP then "yes".