I have just installed OpenSuse 11.4 on a new computer and I want to transfer all my files from my old machine. I am going to use rsync over the network, which I understand I can use to copy over all the files in my home directory including hidden files which are configuration files for applications. The old machine has Mandriva installed using KDE3.
I am a little concerned that the configuration files copied over may interfere with the configuration of the new installation. Obviously some of these config files will be needed so that the settings for applications I will continue to use are still available but there may be conflicts.
Can anyone advise to clear this up for me?
Also, under Mandriva my userID was 500 (mike) and my groupID 501 (mike), whereas in OpenSuse the userID is 1000 and the group doesn’t exist. If I copy over the files do I need to change the IDs to be the same as previously to maintain continuity with other machines on the network?
> I am a little concerned that the configuration files copied over may
> interfere with the configuration of the new installation. Obviously
> some of these config files will be needed so that the settings for
> applications I will continue to use are still available but there may
> be conflicts.
A valid concern. My advice would be to copy over what you need and
nothing else. Many programs’ config files, when you have the same
version on both sides, will be fine so copy those (libreoffice, jedit,
SSH, DB Visualizer, among other that I use are always copied from one
system to another). On the other hand I do not know how much I would
want to move Gnome/KDE settings from one machine to another, especially
with the big changes in both in the last few years. I never try it so
worst case give it a shot and if things fail then remove those
directories from your user’s home directory and they should start from
scratch. Same applies for anything really… copy it over, if it fails
delete the original copy and let the application create things anew.
> Also, under Mandriva my userID was 500 (mike) and my groupID 501
> (mike), whereas in OpenSuse the userID is 1000 and the group doesn’t
> exist. If I copy over the files do I need to change the IDs to be
> the same as previously to maintain continuity with other machines on
> the network?
When you copy things to your system your non-root user (you’re NOT using
‘root’, right?) will not be able to create files with arbitrary UIDs so
files should end up being user-owned and group-owned properly for the
system’s defaults. Worst-case just use ‘chown’ to fix things.
chown -R yourUserHere: ~ #probably need to ‘sudo’ this
By the way, you do have a default group, though it is just the ‘users’
group in SUSE-land.
Good luck.
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mikejd wrote:
> I have just installed OpenSuse 11.4 on a new computer and I want to
> transfer all my files from my old machine. I am going to use rsync over
> the network, which I understand I can use to copy over all the files in
> my home directory including hidden files which are configuration files
> for applications. The old machine has Mandriva installed using KDE3.
>
> I am a little concerned that the configuration files copied over may
> interfere with the configuration of the new installation. Obviously some
> of these config files will be needed so that the settings for
> applications I will continue to use are still available but there may be
> conflicts.
>
> Can anyone advise to clear this up for me?
Take a backup first!
I don’t know how familiar you are with rsync but its easy to get options
wrong. It’s an excellent program but can be intimidating. So use -vv or
so, and do a practice first (use it to copy one or two small directories
to make sure they go to the right place).
If you have disk space, I would copy everything to a temporary location
first. Also see below.
> Also, under Mandriva my userID was 500 (mike) and my groupID 501
> (mike), whereas in OpenSuse the userID is 1000 and the group doesn’t
> exist. If I copy over the files do I need to change the IDs to be the
> same as previously to maintain continuity with other machines on the
> network?
Yes, it is important to use the same user ID and group ID if you want to
share files over the network. It might be easiest to create a new user
with these values and save your existing data there.
Merging new and old data files and configurations will require a bit of
experimentation and research. It all depends what applications you use.
Thanks guys, you’ve really confirmed what I was thinking.
I think I will create a new user with old numeric IDs and transfer all the files to that Home folder. Then I can just copy folders and files to the new user as needed.
You don’t need a new account. ab is correct. When transferring as a normal user, created files will be owned by that user. In addition, rsync actually tries to match up account names when assigning ownership even when transferring as root. Tar also does a similar thing.
However you may want a separate directory as a staging directory to vet the files first.
