how to move my home and apps between linux distros

[kevcoder]

I've been using linux exclusively for a bit more than a year now (Ubuntu, then Mint) and feel comfortable enough that I want to try out some other distros.

Yes I've been doing the Virtualbox thing, but I learn better by just jumping in.

If I create a home partition, can I realistically just install a new distro and point it to partition without any issues? What about things like Apache, MySql etc? Is there an installation guide that would make this easy or should I just backup config files and re-install.

While there is nothing mision critical here, I would like to reduce the stress.

Thanks

[MikeTbob]

I've been using linux exclusively for a bit more than a year now (Ubuntu, then Mint) and feel comfortable enough that I want to try out some other distros.

Yes I've been doing the Virtualbox thing, but I learn better by just jumping in.

If I create a home partition, can I realistically just install a new distro and point it to partition without any issues? What about things like Apache, MySql etc? Is there an installation guide that would make this easy or should I just backup config files and re-install.

While there is nothing mision critical here, I would like to reduce the stress.

Thanks

Hello. Yes, if you have /home on a separate partition you may use it between distros with no problems. The problem here is when you try to use the same user name for each distro. For example: You try to set the background in one distro only to find that it changed all installed distros to the same background. Same thing with applications. It's a PITA and should be avoided like the plague.
There are many installation guides
Install Apache MySQL PHP phpmyadmin (LAMP) on Linux Mint 11 Katya - Hack Your Life!
I'd suggest the Mint version but you can find one for almost every distro with a good Google search. Do you need guides to tell you how to go about migrating as you mentioned above? That shouldn't be a problem because you just make copies of all your .config files and copy them over to the new install. In most cases anyway.

[jayd512]

If I create a home partition, can I realistically just install a new distro and point it to partition without any issues? What about things like Apache, MySql etc? Is there an installation guide that would make this easy or should I just backup config files and re-install.

Short answer... Yeah. Sure can.

Long answer... Yeah. Sure can. But UserID or Login name can cause issue. One distro may try to claim ownership of a file, so now you can't access said file in a simple way from another distro. I've done it, successfully. And had one helluva time getting it to work right. Just can't remember what hoops I had to jump through to do it.

That said, once you have it setup, you're golden. And it is a great way to do it.

[hazel]

What I have done is to set up a separate partition for my documents and mount it somewhere other than $HOME (I use /home/data). This allows the $HOME directories on both my distros to be used independently for distro-specific configuration files. A simple alias (cdd = cd /home/data) allows me to reach this directory easily.

It is also necessary to ensure that your UID and GID are the same on both systems to avoid ownership problems over files. And it is quite useful to put your mailbox on this data directory and make each local $HOME/Mail a link to it.

[elija]

I do the same as hazel excepting I use ~/Documents as the mount point