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I have 4 partitions: boot, root, home, and swap. And 2 Mandrake user accounts. Does Kubuntu's (or Ubuntu's) installer have an option that'll let me replace only the operating system and keep my user account settings in Mandrake? Will Ubuntu be able to import my user accounts from Mandrake?
edit: Nevermind. I'm just going to format and start fresh.
Last edited by Cinematography; 05-21-2005 at 02:08 PM.
You don't need to reformat the home partition. You could either change the uid/gid values to match your ubunto users or copy files that you want later on. The later would probably be easiest. I don't know if ubunto uses the shadow system. If it does, you could even copy the lines from /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow for each user to retain their old passwords.
Something not touched during an install (if it exists in it's own partition) is /usr/local.
A tricky part for the first option would be handling some of the owner/group uid/gid values for some files in ~/.kde. Using the second option you could copy only files in ~/Documents and ~/downloads if you wanted to. Keeping the old home directories around might allow you to recover old email, for example, if your old system stored the messages in the users home directory rather then in var/cache.
Thanks a lot for your reply, jschiwal. I think Mandrake accounts are numbered like this: 501, 502, 503, and Ubuntu accounts are numbered like this: 1000, 1001, 1002. I'm not completely sure though.
The only thing I'm worried about are the DVD backups I have stored on my harddrive. I could easilly reconfigure everything else. My plan is to replace Mandrake with Ubuntu, move my DVD files and documents to Ubuntu, and manaully delete my old accounts.
If you are restoring plain documents from your backup, there would be no problem. However, you will need to use the chown command to change the ownership of the files.
Don't expect to restore files from /etc however. You could restore them to a directory in your home page for example and use them as a reference. Some configuration files may be the same, such as /etc/sudoers. Others will be quite different. For example the startup scripts. Ubuntu doesn't use PAM, so authentication is completely different. Some commands on Mandrake are actually links to something like /usr/sbin/console-helper ( I'm relying on memory here ) which rely on the first command line argument to determine the command to run, and incorporate the PAM system to control access and authentication. Some of the files in /etc/sysconfig may be the same or similar. These files will probably be created by the installation anyway, so you shouldn't need to replace them.
Other files in /etc will be created automatically by some other program and shouldn't be manually altered.
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