johnh123 Posted October 10, 2005 Report Share Posted October 10, 2005 If I want to try out a different distribution, do I have to start all over with my partition? Currently I have /home on its own partition- can I leave it alone, or will it screw up the new distribution somehow? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jboy Posted October 10, 2005 Report Share Posted October 10, 2005 You can use the same separate /home partition, but just make sure that you use a different user name(s) than what you have for your current distribution. I've done this many times with no problem. As long as the user names are different, a separate directory for them will be created, leaving the directories for your current distribution's users alone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted October 11, 2005 Report Share Posted October 11, 2005 Or just removing dir's that are like .kde .gnome, most of the hidden dir's are fine to remove because they will just affect/screw up when you login to what ever DE/WM you use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonEberger Posted October 11, 2005 Report Share Posted October 11, 2005 jboy is completely right. i've done it several times myself. the only hangup i've ever had was that some distributions will let you touch those other users while others won't unless you have root privlieges. fedora plays well with mandrake in case you want to know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted October 11, 2005 Report Share Posted October 11, 2005 But you don't really need a seperate user name, as long as you rm the .kde .gnome type dir/files your fine. You can also as root, depending on your username/group chown -h -R user:group /home/user Doesn't matter who owned it before ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polemicz Posted October 11, 2005 Report Share Posted October 11, 2005 What you do need to be careful about is the uid's that different distributions use for default. Mandriva starts users at 501, Debian distros at 1000. File permissions, etc are by uid, not name. So you can have a file owned by joe in distro a, but in distro b not be able to access the fileWhat I have done in Debian and Ubuntu is to install with a user I will later ignore and add myself with the uid I want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted October 11, 2005 Report Share Posted October 11, 2005 What you do need to be careful about is the uid's that different distributions use for default. Mandriva starts users at 501, Debian distros at 1000. File permissions, etc are by uid, not name. So you can have a file owned by joe in distro a, but in distro b not be able to access the fileWhat I have done in Debian and Ubuntu is to install with a user I will later ignore and add myself with the uid I want. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Or do this: chown -h -R user:group /home/user Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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