Re: Strategic approach to recreating an existing user
- From: Paul E Condon <pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:12:36 -0600
On 20091015_015725, Klistvud wrote:
Dne, 15. 10. 2009 00:17:42 je AG napisal(a):
Due to something that got seriously borked on my wife's Lenny system,
I
have decided that the best way to tackle this is to create a new
account
for her and transfer existing files over (excluding the KDE config
files
which is where the borkness seems to be).
The reasons for doing this are because somehow one or more of the KDE
configuration files has resulted in a number of problems, such as
losing
desktop icons and removable media (e.g. an USB stick) triggering OOo
rather than opening the actual medium, and small but really
irritating
things like that, which despite my best attempts to fix remain
unfixed.
When I create a new account to test these issues in, I cannot
replicate
the problems, so am keen to transfer non-configuration files over
(with
the exception of the applications she uses).
The approach that I was thinking of would be to burn the files and
directories (including her KMail and Evolution directories as well as
the IceWeasel bookmarks) onto a CD, delete her existing /home/<user
directory> and then add her as a new user again, and then transfer
what
is on the CD back into the newly created account.
Can anyone see any potential gotchas to this approach, or recommend a
more sophisticated way of accomplishing the same objective?
TIA
AG
A potential gotcha may be, say, file permissions, but there may be
others I am not aware of. Your wife may "own" files scattered over
several filesystems, and her ownership is established by the OS via her
user number (generally a number over 1000, say, 1001 or 1002 etc), NOT
via her user name. In order to avoid such (and other) potential
gotchas, I would not take your approach. Instead, I would simply set up
a new user foo, rename her current .kde (or .kde3 or .kde4 or whatever
it's called these days) to .kde.old, and copy foo's .kde over to her
home dir using the --no-preserve=all option IIRC. That way, she will
get a fresh default KDE which you'll have to personalize from scratch
again. If you're into risky games, you could even try reinstating some
of her olden configurations by copying select subdirs from .kde.old to
the new .kde dir ... but doing that, as you certainly know, you may
well end messing up the new configuration too.
Good luck!
--
Certifiable Loonix User #481801
I think Kevin's basic suggestion does not change userID number or
userName of the Mrs., so there should be no reason to worry about
files that she owns, but are scattered about in various places in the
file-system.
Grabbing bits and pieces out of KDE config files strikes me as very
foolish. KDE does not publish much information on about the details
of the format of its config files. It makes heavy use of dbus, so
things that appear to the user to be atomic changes may actually
require multiple concurrent atomic changes to the config files. It
is better to use the KDE user interface to adjust the KDE configuration
in the way that the designers intended to have adjustments made.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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