Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote: > I'm less than expert here ;) but wouldn't it suffice to make archival > copies of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, (maybe /etc/group) and /home, and > when you copy them to the newly installed system, just take care to > *NOT* copy any of the /home/*/.[a-zA-Z0-9]* files??? You would still > have the archival copy for reference when editing the new ones... > And for multiple user accounts where the users do some of their own > configuring, you could copy them, then rename them to .OLD${dotfile} > so that the users would still have access to them as a reference in > getting back half remembered configurations. > That would be one way of doing it, but I always want to retain my user settings as they slowly evolve over time and would take a very long time to get back. I use KDE, and keep most of my settings. This works fine on the whole, but there are always a few things (such as custom menu entries in FC2) that have to be deleted to make the new installation function correctly. Jonathan