Can I keep my /home dir if I install Mint over Ubuntu? solve

[Stretch]

I already have Ubuntu installed and ideally I would simply like to install Mint / partition over my Ubuntu / partition. Is this advisable?

This kinda brings to the fore the question "Where exactly do the differences between these 2 distros lie?". If they are purely "cosmetic" and superficial differences, then surely the /home partitions should be compatible.

I know most people will say, "to be sure you ought to do a clean install" but I am not wanting to do that if at all possible. I would happily do it if someone told me "you must wipe your Ubuntu /home because Ubuntu does X, Y and Z whereas Mint does A, B and C".

Any advice?

[scorp123]

then surely the /home partitions should be compatible.

Of course they are. Just pick the absolutely same username (because of the path to the home directory, e.g. /home/stretch ... ) during setup and make sure your /home partition doesn't get overwritten (e.g. formatted).

"to be sure you ought to do a clean install"

You got it wrong. Correct would be: "To be sure you ought to have a backup ready in case things go wrong ..."

"you must wipe your Ubuntu /home because Ubuntu does X, Y and Z whereas Mint does A, B and C".

Only partially relevant here. Whatever these two do different is more or less in other locations (e.g. /usr, /etc, and many other system areas) ... your /home is just the keeper of your settings (e.g. e-mails? Browser settings? Themes?) and your data (e.g. mp3 collection?) .. it doesn't have such a big influence on how a distro per se works.

I moved my /home from many distros to many distros. Some of my stuff here goes as far back as 1996 when I started with Linux

[Stretch]

Thanks for the info

I come from a KDE background and I know that keeping settings in /home (or perhaps ~/.kde) when using different distros, is not really advisable. Sometimes even using the same settings between different versions of the same distro is "unsupported" (see PCLinuxOS TR1 thru Final).

Anyhow... I'll look at replacing Feisty / with Mint, tomorrow. Getting late now and that's when mistakes are made

[Stretch]

Just a quick bump to let you know I have just done what I said above... I installed Mint / partition over Ubuntu / and all is OK... except the old Ubuntu settings and that's easily sorted.

So far so good

[scorp123]

Sometimes even using the same settings between different versions of the same distro is "unsupported" (see PCLinuxOS TR1 thru Final).

Yes, I had such troubles with SUSE. But usually you can delete or reset that offending setting by removing the relevant config file ... Or: Open a second user account and check out its shiny new default settings. Once you've figured out what's different you can copy the new settings over and thus fix your "real" user account (e.g. the one you really want to use). This works pretty well.

[Exakun]

I installed Mint over Ubuntu and kept my Ubuntu /home partition. mintMenu is irrecoverably broken, my Sessions list (which I edited for Ubuntu) wrote over the Mint defaults, and I had to manually remove certain entries for Mint to not fall on itself. All this among other problems both seen and yet unknown.

I'm going to back up the data I actually need then reinstall Mint while wiping /home. I was really surprised that this happened - I would have thought mint would write over those kinds of things instead of accepting completely incompatible settings meant for the old Ubuntu install.

[Stretch]

Just remove / backup

~/.gnome
~/.gnome2
~/.gconf
~/.gconfd
~/.metacity

and you should have a virgin Mint session on your next login.

[marlene]

Interesting.. I had exactly the same problems cause I installed Linux Mint Celena by making an upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06.

I followed a completely different way just to avoid this problems.

I didn't want to format my home partition cause I wanted to keep my previous application settings and I didn't want to reset the browser and especially the mail client from scratch. ( I have 3700 mail addresses in there and it's a real headache to import them again. )

So I installed Celena by creating an new user and completely new home folder which I named it Marlene1.
I didn't format the home partition that I had, so the new home folder was installed in the system partition.
The old home was mounted as an hda3 device in media directory as an external device.
So I did the following things to "transform" the old home folder to a new one.

I copied the new home folder in hda3 ( in the third partition that it was the home folder that I had previously) with the following command:

cp /home/marlene1 /media/sda3

Then I umounted the sda3

umount /dev/sda3

The next thing I had to do was to set the new home folder and I did this by editing the file /etc/ fstab which is a file that gives to the system information about what is its partition.

I did it this way:

getid /etc/fstab -----------------------> that opened the file with the text editor gedit

Then I found the line that had the information about the third partition

# /dev/sda3
UUID=92c2bcd8-54d8-4f33-8191-bed5ca4225c5 /media/sda3 reiserfs

and I changed it to this

# /dev/sda3
UUID=92c2bcd8-54d8-4f33-8191-bed5ca4225c5 /home reiserfs

Then I had to deleted the marlene1 folder from the system partition.
I did it as root:

sudo su

But I had to be sure that the system would delete the right folder so I gave for one more time the command:

umount /dev/sda3

and then I deleted normally the file from the system partition.

rm -fr /home/marlene1

So then I mounted the new folder with
mount -a
and
mount |grep home

When I reboot the system I had two files in the home folder.
The old one and the new one.

I just copied all my files to the new home folder ( 75 G ) at ones, without having to take a new full backup to all these files, with a simple copy paste, I copied the hidden files ( that had the application settings ) that I wanted, from the previous home, and then I made the installation of the applications that I needed, which worked exactly the same as previously.

I didn't loose the gnome desktop, I kept some very nice pointers and all the fonds that I had and I finished this way the upgrade from Dapper Drake to Celena with an installation that lasted about 45 minutes.