How to copy ~/.kde from old system to new?

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 27 April 2008, Larry Hartman wrote:
> What steps do I need to take? Initially my instincts tell me that I should
> use the same username.

If you're keeping it in the same family (Debian-based original distro 
Debian-based new distro) then this is about as easy as it gets.  Be sure not 
to format your original /home partition when you install the new OS.  If you 
use the same username(s) you had before (and if you have more than one, 
re-create them in the same order they were in originally,) that is all you 
need to worry about.  You will log in and own your old files, and shouldn't 
normally experience any unusual side effects.

If you change usernames, or create users in a different order, you can run 
into file ownership problems.  Now that I think about it, this could be a 
fairly annoying problem on Ubuntu, because there is no root login by default, 
and if you don't own your own home directory, you might not be able to log in 
to use sudo to change the ownership back to yourself.  There are ways around 
that, but it would be far less complicated just to keep the username the same 
as it was before.

If you change to a different flavor of distro, the ranges of numbers used for 
userids can vary, so that could be another problem to consider.  The first 
user on a Debian or Ubuntu system is 1000, I think, whereas it used to be 500 
on Mandrake, I think.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre