install new version of fedora

[sachinjnumca]

i have tried various versions of linux, but i have one problem, that when ever i install new version

my previous settings are all lost, is there some way to keep the original settings

[Irithori]

All your settings are in your $HOME.

So if you dedicate a partition to /home at install time and
if you do not format /home at the next install and rather just mount that partition as /home again,
and also use the same username (and hopefully uid)

Then almost all settings will be re-used.
I say almost, as a new distribution will probably have new versions of your applications,
that might or might not be able to read old configs.

That said, in my experience this works quite well.
I recently updated a ubuntu 9.04 to 10.10 for a friend that way,
and only had to adjust the gnome theme and the firefox shortcut

[sachinjnumca]

so when i install fedora, you mean to say, i should separately create a partition for my /home ,is it
can i please get ur email id

[Irithori]

so when i install fedora, you mean to say, i should separately create a partition for my /home ,is it

Yes

can i please get ur email id

No
But you can ask in this forum.

[sachinjnumca]

when i installed fedora 12 , i manually created partitions as
/
/boot
swap
/home
so i should not touch this home partition and rest i should format to install new
fedora 13 and when i install new partition i should mount my /home
partition, this is what u mean to say??/

[Irithori]

Exactly.

Once the installer gives you the option for advanced partitioning, do so.
- format the device containing / and reuse it as /
- format the device containing /boot and reuse it as /boot
- *DO NOT* format the device containing /home, reuse it as /home

You also need to use the same loginname as before.
Even then, there is a chance, the new user does not get the same uid as the previous one.
But that is easy to fix with one chown -R

If you feel unsure about the procedure or have valueable data in $HOME, you can always create a backup

cd /home
tar czpf <BACKUPDIR>/home_sachinjnumca_23Oct2010.tar.gz sachinjnumca

Where <BACKUPDIR> is for example on a usb drive or on a networkshare.

[MikeTbob]

Keep in mind that you can also use the same /home partition for several distros at once. I mean if you have 3 distros installed onto your hard drive...you can share the /home partition between them, there is no need to create more than one /home partition if you make it large enough.