I have just installed LM 19.1 XFCE on my new laptop, having used it on my old laptop. I retain the settings of the old laptop I am thinking of copying its /home directory to the new laptop. Any reasons why I should not do that?

not really, unless you want to start out fresh. I'd check your cache in your old home, and thumbnails, and such there maybe some old stuff you do not really need to carry over into your new home.

OK, thanks for your advice.

I just copied the /home directory from my old PC to my new one. That seemed to have gone well, but after a few minutes the cursor froze again, so I forced a shutdown. When I booted up it went normally, except that even though I had set both on my old machine and the new one to log me in automatically, the PC now asked me to log in. No problem, except that the screen then went black and stayed black. Pressing ESC or Enter didn't do anything. I forced another shutdown, booted up, same thing again.

This seems to me like a simple setting that needs to get fixed, but how to avoid the black screen after typing in my password and which setting is it???

what command did you use and method to copy it over to your other laptop?

try switching ttys, go in cli mode and rename that desktop/window manager config dir and then go back to your gui tty and log in to reset the desktop files. If everything works then you can delete the old renamed one. after you swapped out anything you need into the new one, if need be.

sudo cp -av /path/to/old/homedir /path/to/new/systems/home/
with the old home directory being on an ext4-formatted USB stick. (BTW I don't see an icon for code)

* What is "ttys"?
* can I go to the terminal before typing in my password?
* renaming the desktop/window manager config dir: what is the command I should use for that?
* by "old" config directory do you mean the one that was originally on my new machine? If so, that means that by "new" config directory you mean the one I copied from my old machine to the new machine.
* can I then log in?
* what do you mean by resetting the desktop files? Which files? Reset them to what?

Sorry for all these basic questions but I ma still a very green newbie, so please accept my apologies.

ttys,

x=1-12 ie
then login to get back to the gui login manager, just run down the f keys holding the ctrl+alt keys down, most likely it is F1, F5 or F6, some times F7 that is setup for your login manager to reside on.

The origin of TTY in Unix is from TeleTYpewriter.

you can type in code tags, [ code ] and [ / code ] without spaces between brackets. it is HTML code.

nevertheless if you cannot figure out how to switch your tty then you can just log in delete or rename your dir for that desktop then logout and back in as well. buy you saying it locks up switching ttys gets in you in under the terminal cli.

I told you I am a newbie, which is why I listed my questions about your reply, most of which you did not answer. The rest of your reply was gobbledygook to me. Next time try to put yourself in the newbie's place, then compose a reply. This is not meant as a kick in the groin, just some friendly advice from a newbie who is not versed in the technical side of Linux.

I did try the CTRL+Alt+Fx, which eventually gave me a log-in choice - I believe it was F5, but am not sure. After logging in the thing started reeling off a seemingly endless list of things it was doing/checking/... so I forced a shutdown.

I have decided to reinstall and to not bother spending hours trying to correct this, only to maybe come to the conclusion that it cannot be fixed to my satisfaction after all.

Make sure the things under $HOME/ have your user as the owner:group.

$ chown -R $(whoami):$(whoami) /home/$(whoami)

Otherwise most things $HOME/.??? can be deleted, although you'll probably want to avoid the .bash* ones. You might have some overrides in there causing issues. Or per the previous permissions are messed up as your user on the new system got a different uid value. And the copied /home has the "other" value which is likely a different user. So they cannot be read by the applications, or created, or written to by the apps. Thus causing them to mis-behave.

$ id

NO where do you inform me or other that you are a newbie in this thread other than this post. (deflection)

this fix might be a lot easier then you think.
Just taking it one step at a time here, yo.

it is not like I have and I am sure others have not had to change permissions. etc..


the way Shadow_7 wrote it is actually a nice way of doing it.
I'd of just given you this and told you to change the UID and GID to match you and your primary group before running it.
to get your id numbers and names
which I actaully put in here then removed, just taking it one step at a time. so I removed it, and was going to have you try that next. but Shadow_7 beat me to it. so this poses another question.

when to toss in the towel and re-install to save time and/to elevate stress?

Switching tty's is a distro Independent to how many tty's the system has and which F keys work and which ones don't. Which by the way you too can take control of this as well.

The assigning of what key(s) and how many you want. But enough of that. as suggested you can run that command to change permissions in lue of re-installing.

this way too you will have all of your old settings customizations, and files now changed to what the current system permissions of your use has.

if that does not work you can also delete your user and home then add the user again, which too is a lot faster then re-installing the entire system for something like this.

One just needs to be in root users home or someone elses home and you should already have the root password, or that other user, which is just a name has sudo rights. Using the proper commands all of this could have been easily done without having to go through a complete system re-installation.

make your terminal your friend. As well as going from one laptop to another and asking about is it safe to just copy over files, shows a level of knowledge of copying, which is associated with permissions. Therefore indicates same said knowledge of this just by how the question was asked.

and btw LQ Newbie only means new to this forum. it does not in any way indicate ones knowledge of Linux or anything else.


may indicate something completely different is going on with your system.

See the last line in post #6 above.

Why not go to that step directly? From your reply I gather that is possible, though I may be wrong.

I did a complete fresh reinstall, and will have to go through the frustrating but necessary task of setting things up manually again. I know the terminal is an important tool in Linux, and I am slowly getting to know my way around a bit, but at the end of the day my computer is just a tool that I want to work, I am not interested in endless tinkering, which is why I chose Mint rather than Arch.

Many thanks for your help with this issue, no doubt we'll meet again.

the reason why one copies over the old config files. To eliminate having to redo everything.
as pointed out, copy over, change permissions / ownership if necessary.

I've done this many times, copy over home to another one, though I've worked it down to only what I want to move over. Mostly config files for desktops, and window managers, and a few apps. Not my entire old home.

your system was glitching out, so I suggested going in the back door.

So why did you not mention this is your 1st reply (post #2 above) ??? That would have avoided a lot of problems, and then using the backdoor as a corrective action. I would expect someone with your experience to help newbies upfront, rather than let them muddle through and end up in a mess. I must say, I am rather surprised, to put it mildly.

Old config files can also be problematic. More so these days as things move to $HOME/.config/ versus older locations like $HOME/.pulse/. With various changes to config syntaxes and such.

That is what I realised, and that even applies to moving /home between machines with the exact same OS, i.e. in my case Linux Mint 19.1 XFCE on the old and the new machine.

So your observation is in fact an advice to never transfer the /home directory. Nevertheless, there must be some way to safely preserve and transfer one's settings, or am I to accept that every 5 years, after the end of support for a particular LTS, or when one buys a new computer - ahem - one just has to install the new OS and reset everything manually??