I am thinking of moving from Suse 10.1 to Kunbuntu. Suse seems to have gone bloated and prone to running off and doing things that require 99% of the CPU without telling me what it's doing and why. However before taking the step I am wondering what - if anything - will survive of my Suse setup if I install Kubuntu. Will the home directories at least be preserved? Will other installed KDE applications? Finally will any non-KDE apps survive? A lot of stuff (especially multimedia stuff) took quite a bit of installing and getting right under Suse. I am not averse to doing it again, but I just want to know what I should expect. Any help apprecoated. And sorry if this is answered anywhere in this Forum already - I did lok through recent posts and did not see anything relevant.

Thanks

Bogzab

while installing kubuntu, make sure you select manual partitioning. Select not to format /home.

I am not sure you whether you can save anything else.

That's what I did when I migrated from SuSE 10.1 to Ubuntu 6.06 and I changed from KDE to Gnome as well.Using your old binaries seems a bit dangerous. I did use my old dvdcss lib without trouble. Truth is that Ubuntu made many things much easier to install than SuSE did. My recommendation is to favor the Ubuntu repositories, going elsewhere only on an exception basis. Kubuntu and Ubuntu use the same repositories. They are only separate with the live CD installs to keep it all to a single CD rather than the 6 CDs SuSE requires. There even a Xubuntu if you need a smaller GUI like xfce.

If bogzab is already using SUSE with KDE, there is no reason to consider Ubuntu or Xubuntu. As ppuru stated, an install that leaves the /home partition alone should be reasonably smooth. Incidentally bogzab, I think you need to use the "alternate install CD" to gain that degree of flexibility.

That sounds like it has a major chance to go south(admittedly, I've never tried what you're doing). Why not just back up your critical files, and start over? Make notes of web links etc that helped you with whatever problem your having,a nd go from there.

IGF

The simplest thing to do is to save your /home in a spare partition and then do a clean install. You can then copy your backup /home over that generated by the install.

That brings an interesting thought to mind. If there is no separate /home partition in the existing Linux install, it does make sense to save it somewhere that will not be affected by a new install, create a separate /home partition in the new install, and then attempt to copy the contents of the backed-up /home directory into the new /home partition.

Still, if a separate /home partition already exists, I would not try to move it. (Back it up, yes. Move it and move it back, no.) The reason is that /home contains all sorts of symbolic links that may become broken, hidden files that may be overwritten with incompatible files during a directory "move," and so forth.

Cogar,

In practice I don't have a separate home partition -- same concerns you have. What I do is create a data only partition which is totally distro agnostic. All my distros mount it as /Share. Normally I point applications to openoffice to that partition for document storage. This has always worked for me.