I love linux (regarding new install keeping old settings/config)

[agibby5]

I recently bought a new computer and it will now serve as my working computer and my old one will become a server. I wanted to install Ubuntu 7.10 on the new one (rather than Vista that came preloaded). On my old computer, I just copied my /home directory into the new computer's /home directory, rebooted, and everything was setup exactly the same as my old computer was (minus the need to reinstall the same apps). Once I reinstalled all the apps, there was little to no configuration... it was all taken care of. What an awesome 'feature' of linux.

 

[Praetor]

Whoever said linux was more difficult?

 

[IamDavid]

I had no idea this worked. What all setting does it save? Firefox settings and plugins by any chance? I hate going thru reinstalling these and the back up thingy never works for me.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: IamDavid
I had no idea this worked. What all setting does it save? Firefox settings and plugins by any chance? I hate going thru reinstalling these and the back up thingy never works for me.

not sure about firefox, im booted into windows at the moment, but backing up all the ~/.* stuff keeps configs for desktop settings and programs and such.

its also worth backing up various things in /etc if youre going to need them on another box (ssh, samba, nfs configs, hosts file, that sort of thing)

 

[Nothinman]

I had no idea this worked. What all setting does it save? Firefox settings and plugins by any chance? I hate going thru reinstalling these and the back up thingy never works for me.

It should contain all of the settings for your personal account, anything you did system-wide will likely be in /etc so that'll have to be pulled over separately. Depends on how you installed the plugins, if they're just in your personal account then they should be in your home directory and should come over just fine.

 

[Praetor]

your firefox profile and extensions should be installed until ~/.mozilla.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

 

[Brazen]

There's no place like ~/

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Brazen
There's no place like ~/

I chuckled.

 

[ethebubbeth]

Originally posted by: Praetor
your firefox profile and extensions should be installed until ~/.mozilla.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

Plugins will most likely not be in your home directory, however.

EDIT: default directory for firefox plugins in 7.10 is /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

 

[Nothinman]

Plugins will most likely not be in your home directory, however.

Depends on how you installed them, if you used packages then they won't be but you should just install the same packages on the new system anyway.

 

[JD50]

You can do basically the same thing by just copying your profile in windows, but yea, Linux rocks!

 

[Nothinman]

You can do basically the same thing by just copying your profile in windows, but yea, Linux rocks!

It doesn't work nearly as well because of issues in the HKCU registry hive with permissions and such, but yes it's possible.

 

[silverpig]

This is one of the main reasons why I have a seperate /home partition. I used to overclock like mad, used to tweak everything, used to use gentoo and play with CFLAGS etc just for fun. I b0rked more than one system. The nice thing is I'd just reinstall and all my settings would be back to normal.

Now I'm on ubuntu, don't overclock (it's funny how fast a dual 1.8 GHz opteron with 1 GB ram is when you're not gaming...), just keep everything up to date and know that it's all backed up just in case I have some massive power failure or something.

 

[agibby5]

ive been thinking about making my own partition for the /home directories... and tehn creating a nightly or weekly backup of it to a secondary hard drive. that way it'd be really easy to 'roll back' changes that caused any errors/issues.... still deciding how i want to do this.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

So I guess this would work in going from a VM to an actual machine, correct? Hmm. I've been putting off putting up another linux box until I get another machine built, but I want to do some stuff in linux. VM -> box later seems like it might work.