Moving day

silver · Post by **silver** » Mon Sep 10, 2007 11:33 pm

Love the work on mint. Celena is no exception. Good job.

Only found one area where I think mint could shine above the rest.

I have been using Cassandra, but I like challenges so I down loaded Celena.

My work came when I wanted to move my home directory from Cassandra to Celena.
Wow. Never seen anything so difficult.

First Aptocd didn't move all my programs, not even close. Second you can't just move the home directory from one installation to another. Talk about crashing a system.

I think It would be great in the installation process when on step 3 or 4 I can't remember, but it asks if you would like to incorporate a user file from another installation. At that point maybe it could ask if you would like your home directory with all programs moved also. That would be so great.
Mint would shine above the rest.

Other than that everything went great and works great.

Ronnie

Husse · Post by **Husse** » Tue Sep 11, 2007 5:24 am

Well to be able to move home like you want you should create a home partition and move home to it
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _partition
You can't keep a folder on a partition you format
Maybee I misunderstand you to some degree but the simple solution si to follow the wiki

silver · Post by **silver** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 10:36 am

I have two hard drives that I work with. So Cassandra runs on one and Celena runs on the other.

It's easy enough after having installed celena to copy the home folder from Cassandra, and that's just what I did.

Thats when all hell broke loose.

It's not just copying standard folders. that went well. It was when I copied all the hidden folders that are in the home directory.

I don't know why my system crashed. But it did.

Being a newbie at Linux I just think that there could be an easier way for people to migrate. Something a little bit more like point and click.

With a nice migration tool anyone from a system similar to mint could ideally migrate into mint without many tears. Bringing all there programs and presets with them. (Debian, ubuntu etall)

Thanks for all the help
Ronnie

scorp123 · Post by **scorp123** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 11:10 am

silver wrote: It's not just copying standard folders. that went well. It was when I copied all the hidden folders that are in the home directory.

That highly depends on how you copied them. I copy my /home from one distro to another since 1996. KDE's settings (underneath ~/.kde ) are sometimes problematic depending on the version your new distro uses, but other than that there is no bigger problem.

silver wrote: I don't know why my system crashed. But it did.

"my system crashed" is a pretty broad term. Generally: whatever the settings in your /home are: they can't crash your system, they can only cause problems in your GUI (e.g. icons are not where they should be, too many or too little menu entries are there or not, wrong wallpapers, etc.) or your personal settings such as e-mails don't work as expected (e.g. Thunderbird can't see your mail settings because your mails are underneath ~/.thunderbird instead of ~/.mozilla-thunderbird ...) ... But they can't crash your system! Only system-wide settings such as those in /etc could do that.

silver wrote: Being a newbie at Linux I just think that there could be an easier way for people to migrate.

It can hardly be easier than it is already now: a mere copy command will migrate all your settings between as many systems as you wish

silver · Post by **silver** » Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:59 pm

I understand completely what you are saying and I understand how easy it is supposed to be.

I try to explain better. I did a new install of celena on a different hard drive. After it was installed. And tried, it came up good everything worked. I booted to Cassandra and copied my complete /home folder to celena. I copied nothing else.

I figured if I booted Celena and then copied the /home folder that it wouldn't work because I was running Celena.

When I went to boot Celena again it, for lack of a better term, crashed and wouldn't boot. Lots of errors. I couldn't even get to the command prompt.

This to me isn't easy. I deffine easy a little bit differently. A new user shouldn't have that much problems with something so simple.

To fix it I did a complete new install, again. And didn't copy over all of my /home folder. I purposely left out some of the ./ hidden folders that I thought may or may not have given me problems.
Now everything works great. But had I not already had some understanding of computers I wouldn't have had any Idea what folders to possibly leave out in the copy.

Maybe no one else has had this problems.. I don't know. But the way I see it if one newbie can have it others can too.

Just my thoughts
Ronnie