Installing Across Distros

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

Hi!

I have a custom Ubuntu remix that I love. It's my first Linux and I'm sure I'll coming running back home to it unless this experiment is absolutely awesome beyond reason... but, question:

If I install a new OS - say, PCLinuxOS - on my hard drive, can I leave my /home partition unformatted to keep my pictures and songs and stuff just as I would if I was reinstalling Ubuntu? Or does "crossing distros" make that impossible?

I'll run from the live CD for awhile first of course... and back up all my data of course. But I prefer to keep all my settings and stuff as well as just pictures and songs and schoolwork and such.

Thanks in advance for your replies,
Amy

[MikeTbob]

Hi!

I have a custom Ubuntu remix that I love. It's my first Linux and I'm sure I'll coming running back home to it unless this experiment is absolutely awesome beyond reason... but, question:

If I install a new OS - say, PCLinuxOS - on my hard drive, can I leave my /home partition unformatted to keep my pictures and songs and stuff just as I would if I was reinstalling Ubuntu? Or does "crossing distros" make that impossible?

I'll run from the live CD for awhile first of course... and back up all my data of course. But I prefer to keep all my settings and stuff as well as just pictures and songs and schoolwork and such.

Thanks in advance for your replies,
Amy

Yes, as long as your /home directory is on it's own partition. If you did not create a separate /home partition when you installed the remix, it probably didn't get created, but that's just a guess.
If you'd like to check, use these commands and post the results.

sudo fdisk -l
sudo cat /etc/fstab
mount

It's usually a good idea to use a different user name on the new OS as this will prevent things from getting mixed up.

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

Yup, I have a 10 G "/" partition, 4 G "swap" (twice the amount of RAM) and the rest is "/home".

That sounds good to go, but I'm a little confused by your last statement, advising me to use a different user name on the new OS. I could see the need for it if I was dual-booting, but if I'm replacing Ubuntu with PCLOS, what would get messed up?

Thanks,
Amy

[meton_magis]

untill you know that everything transfered OK, you'll want to keep things seperate (which a different username / home directory will do) then transfer what you need over when you need it. You will retain all data, but stuff like configurations from incompatible versions of applications (doesn't happen often, but it does) will not be transfered over causing problems.

you can even do as root in a command prompt
# chown -R newusername:newusername /path/to/old/home

and your new userid will have full access to the previous home directory.

[MikeTbob]

Yup, I have a 10 G "/" partition, 4 G "swap" (twice the amount of RAM) and the rest is "/home".

That sounds good to go, but I'm a little confused by your last statement, advising me to use a different user name on the new OS. I could see the need for it if I was dual-booting, but if I'm replacing Ubuntu with PCLOS, what would get messed up?

Thanks,
Amy

You are correct, I just misread your post.