want to copy all user desktop settings and applications

dogwind · 11-20-2009, 04:11 PM

I have an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop at work that I've been using with VirtualBox to run Windows XP in.
Today I found out how to configure my Ubuntu desktop to login directly to the MS Domain,using likewise, so that now I have two home directories:
/home/user and
/home/DOMAIN/user

So now I want to solely login to Ubuntu as user@DOMAIN.com. But whenever I do this, I lose all of my settings, applications, and configuration that I had as /home/user.

How do I easily copy all settings and applications from /home/user to /home/DOMAIN/user?

Many thanks in advance.

pljvaldez · 11-20-2009, 04:26 PM

You can probably just copy all the hidden "dot" files over from your old directory to the new directory. You may have some permission issues to fix though.

mdever44 · 11-20-2009, 04:34 PM

This should do it.

Code:

cp -r /home/user /home/DOMAIN/user

You'll need write permissions to /home/DOMAIN if running as user, though; or read permissions to /home/user if runnning as DOMAIN. Get those with this:

Code:

chmod u+w /home/DOMAIN/user

or

Code:

chmod u+r -R /home/user

respectively. You'll want to change these back though.

Code:

chmod u-w -R /home/DOMAIN/user

Code:

chmod u-r -R /home/user

dogwind · 11-20-2009, 09:10 PM

That's what I was afraid of. I thought there might be a cleaner, easier, more sure way, such as a widget or something. But if not, so be it. I'll give it a shot. Thank you mdever44!

mdever44 · 11-20-2009, 09:38 PM

3 lines in the terminal not clean? I suppose you could (mostly) copy and paste the code...
As a side note, the code I posted for copying will copy all of your documents as well. You may or may not want that. If you don't want that, I'll write a script that does that. In the mean time; here's a script you can just run as DOMAIN:

Code:

gksu -u user chmod -R u+r ~
cp -R /home/user ~
gksu -u user chmod -R u-r ~

EDIT:
Here's a script which only copies settings:

Code:

gksu -u user chmod -R u+r ~
mkdir ~/user
find /home/user -maxdepth 1 -wholename "/home/user/.*" -print0 | xargs -0 cp -R -t ~/user
gksu -u user chmod -R u-r ~

These can be run without the terminal; just copy them into a text file and make them executable and run.

rich_c · 11-20-2009, 11:12 PM

Personally, I prefer the chown approach. Here's a tutorial/tip I did some while back that should provide a basis for what you want to do with regard to permissions.

dogwind · 11-23-2009, 09:02 AM

I also don't like changing permissions, especially on the user account that already contains all of the desired settings. After further consideration, this is what I did:
telinit 1

root@machine:/home/user$ tar cvf user.tar *
root@machine:/home/user$ mv user.tar /home/DOMAIN/user
root@machine:/home/user$ cd /home/DOMAIN/user
root@machine:/home/DOMAIN/user$ tar xvf user.tar
root@machine:/home/DOMAIN/user$ chown -R DOMAIN/user:DOMAIN/user *

telinit 3

This got me mostly what I was looking for without tweaking rwx permissions, just owner/group permissions.

The biggest problem now is the DOMAIN login settings were messed up somehow. I'll fix that and update here.