Migrating Gloria from Gnome to XFCE [[SOLVED]]

[markfiend]

I've been running Mint since April (first Felicia then Gloria), and I fancy migrating from the standard Gloria Gnome desktop to the XFCE version. I've downloaded the Gloria XFCE RC, and everything works great from the live CD.

A couple of questions:

1: Ought I wait for the final release or should I just jump in?
2: I have a sensible partition scheme (as well as swap I have 3 partitions: /, /home, and /home/mark/data) so I should be able to just install into the / partition, preserving data and settings in the other two partitions, am I right? (This worked on Felicia -> Gloria transition so I'm not too worried about that.)
3: The additional software I've installed through Synaptic: Is there any way to make Synaptic "remember" what I have and then download and reinstall it all again or is it safer just to do it myself? (To be fair, as far as I can remember there's not a great deal I've added: it's just python 3, firefox 3.5, blender and a couple of games)
(3b: The settings for these packages are stored in /home so should be preserved as noted in 2 above, yes?)
4: errr....
5: That's it!

[markfiend]

Ah what the heck, I'm going for it.

I'll answer all my own questions (assuming all goes to plan) in a while.

[viking777]

Well, if you have already 'gone for it' then I am probably too late. Also you may already be aware of what I am about to say, but just in case you are not, I should mention that insatlling the CE edition is not the only way to get an XFCE desktop. If you open Synaptic, do a quick search for xfce, at the top of the list you will find the meta package 'xfce4'. If you install this onto your existing Gnome desktop you will have a choice to log into xfce at the next boot, along with an absolute guarantee that you will not have lost any of your additional software. Of course what you end up with will not be the same as the CE edition ( and I am a great fan of this variant) but it will contain xfce + all your extras, which is what you seem to be wanting.

[markfiend]

I'm back up and running on XFCE.

Thanks viking but I did it from the CD, all went well. All settings etc seem to have come across no problem.

Edit to add: Answer my own questions:
1: Jump in. This is Linux!
2: Yes. All documents and files are intact. See also 3b below.
3. I wrote down the 12 or so packages I had installed (and wanted to keep) and just installed them all again. (Only problem was with Blender, but that seems to be having problems with on-board Intel graphics anyway. It didn't work properly under Gnome either, so no real loss. -- fixed here)
3b. Yes, all settings (icluding firefox addons, bookmarks, even cookiies) have come across.