Hi, I have been using Mandriva (sicne it was called mandrake) for almost 3 years now. A friend in the office mentioned that he is using a distro called ubuntu and that he is very happy with it, I'm also happy with mandriva but his statement make me think about it...

I was able set up a vmware machine to test ubuntu and I'm quite thrilled about how clean the os is and how gnome looks and behaves as an interface (mandriva uses kde).

the question that is if I decide to switch from mandriva to ubuntu, how shoudl I do it? I have a 160 gb hard drive partitioned like this:

/ -> 19 GB
Swap 1.5 GB
/home -> 127 GB

I know that all customizations for user settings (desktop, brakground, etc.) are stored inside hidden files inside the /home/user directory.

Can I install ubuntu without repartitioning the drives so that I don't the data (music, movies, etc.) inside my user's home directory?

thanks in advance for your help.....

If you want to overwrite Mandriva, then, yes. Just tell Ubuntu to reformat your current root partition as the root partition and mount the /home partition as /home. Are you absolutely sure you want to get rid of Mandriva, though?

Well, I think you'll have a fabulous time with Ubuntu. Having a friend who uses the same distro as you will definitely help you get set up okay.

You may want to check this out, though, too:

http://www.ubuntuguide.org

I have done this before, but I read somewhere earlier that it's generally not a good idea to set up a /home partition that is shared by various different distro's because of slight differences in the way they save settings for different applications... I guess you could just go and do it without re-formatting it though.

No, you're right. It is a bad idea to share one /home partition between two distros, but the xavierh wants not to have to repartition. With the current set up, there's no way to have both Mandriva and Ubuntu sharing a /home partition without repartitioning.

if he removed all the files/directories that could be the source of problems, i.e. ~/.mozilla, ~/.kde and kept ~/music (for an example), when he installs ubuntu, would it not create the neccessary files and keep the ~/music files there? What I mean is keep only the files he wants and get rid of config files.

To clarify....what I want to do is to switch permanently from mandriva to ubuntu.....sorry if I wasn't clear before...

That sounds like a great idea, but I would keep .mozilla, though.

Yeah, I think we understood that, it's just Mandriva and Ubunutu may have slightly different ways of structuring config files, for example, so their might be some problems with certain applications if you used the config. files from mandriva in ubuntu. I don't think there would be to much of a problem, as I have switched from Mandrake 10.1 to Debian without many problems (I can't remeber there being any).

you can always export the bookmarsk to a bookmark.html file so that you can restore it later. is this feasible without losing the important data as I mentioned before?

Or move all .* folders/files (i.e. hidden conf. files) into a folder i.e. mandrake_settings.

would be to rename that particular users home directory so that when the installation is completed I just need to copye the files that I need back to the user's new home directory

Hmm, yea, that is a sensible idea come to think of it...

Instead of the all or nothing approach, why not make a new setup with Ubuntu. That way you could see if things will work, or keep a dual boot system.

this is exaclty what I'm doign so far by using vmware.. testing if things work....what I'll do tomorrow is to test on another mandriva vm that I have to see how can I switch to ubuntu....

once again... thanks for all the replies...there are several things that I'm liking about ubuntu already.....

Cool man, I haven't used Ubuntu much but I use debian (Ubuntu is based on debian) so a good choice Hope it all goes well.