Mint and existing /home

[varaonaid]

Hi,

I'm soon to install Linux Mint for the first time and I wanted to check something out before I proceed. Mint will be the third OS on my laptop (another linux distro and win2k). I have a fat32 partition viewable by both current OS's and also a seperate /home partition. Does Mint allow me to keep all my existing /home files? What I'd like to do is create the same username on mint as my other distro so that even apps like Firefox, etc always have the same configuration (I was told this is easily possible). Can I do this without overwriting my current /home and /home/username files?

Thanks so much in advance. I can't wait to start using this distro.

[Sorensei]

Hello,

That's what I did. I have an old SUSE on one partition, /home on another and I installed Mint on a third one.

Just one thing, if your other distro is not debian-based you may have to redirect your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles, The usual folder is .firefox or .thunderbird, while in Mint it's .mozilla for firefox and .mozilla-thunderbird for thunderbird.

That's about all the problems I had...

[varaonaid]

Thanks for the reply, Sorensei. You really put my mind at ease that the install will go well and not mess up my /home. My current distro is actually debian based so hopefully I'll have very little problem.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

[Sorensei]

Good luck then.
Just be careful when selecting where to install - I think I had to do it manually.
Anyhow if I managed to do it - I'm a very basic user - you should be able to do it too!
Just to be on the safe side, I'd suggest a backup beforehand...

[varaonaid]

Yeah, I was thinking of backing up as well. Always better to be safe than sorry!

Thanks for the heads up about having to do it manually, though. That way I won't be surprised in the middle of it.