[plug] new lappy, just move "home" ?

[Timothy White]

On 8/19/05, rpowersau at gmail.com <rpowersau at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/18/05, Senectus . <senectus at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Looks like I _may_ be getting a new laptop (cause this new one is
> > utter crap), I'd like to transfer my home environment with minimal
> > fuss.. do you think it should just be a case of :
> > logout and login as root
> > kill X and GDM 
> > Copy it over... ??
> > or is there something that I'm not thinking of that will cause a
> > godawful mess on the new machine?
> 
>  The only 'gotcha' I hit once was the user id number. My original user
> number was  1000. When I installed linux on the new machine by default/habit
> I created a user and being the first non-root user its number was also 1000.
> When I transfered my original user onto the machine it didn't like the idea
> of two users with the same number.  :)

Nothing a quick chown -R can't fix. And it's not like you don't have
root. If it was 2 servers/computers that you didn't own, then you'd
probably want to do it via rsync with ssh to ensure permissions and
ownership worked fine. Or you could tar it up, so that the user who
untar's it is the one to own the files. I'm sure there are other ways
to transfer the files so that the new user is the one who owns them.
The only time I can think of it being hard (when you don't have root)
is when you have transferred the whole disk drive, and the user ID's
don't match up, but I believe there are ways around this as well.

Tim