[RLUG] Safely changing distros

[Jeff Shippen]

If you have /home as it's own partition, no problem at all.  For 
example, when I first installed Linux, keeping that exact concern in 
mind, I set up a large partition up and set it to mount as /home, all in 
the partitioning stage of the install.  Now every install after that, 
you want to make sure to do a custom partitioning, and ensure that the 
partition is not formated, and again mount it to /home.  The rest of the 
partitions you'll probably want formated. 

You can look up websites for partitioning guides too, but it's basically 
all dependent on how big your hard drive is.  If I only had a 6 gig 
drive, on an older PC, I would just have two partitions personally.  one 
for / and one for swap. If the hard drive is large, I use the number of 
install CDs there are as a guide to how big I would need for the / 
partition.  With 5 CDs, you will need at least 3.5 gigs, so you might 
just add a couple gigs for a 6 gig partition if you were being 
conservative, or make it bigger if you anticipate installing large software.

Hope that helps,
Jeff

Dennis Bagley wrote:
> If you wanted to switch to a different distro but keep a bunch of 
> files you had in your home directory......
>
> Besides making backups - is there a way to install the new distro and 
> keep your home directory pretty much intact?
>
> (not re-format and not erase everything?)
>
> Dennis
>
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