Arch Linux

MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

KDE & migrating from another distro (PCLOS) to Arch

I hope this part of the forum is the correct area for my question, but in the event it is not, I apologise in advance and if someone could tell me where to put this I'd be grateful.

I've been experimenting with Arch on a laptop and I've found it to be quite useful so far.  However, on the laptop I formatted my /home partition (after making data backups) so that I started with an uncluttered partition.  KDE on the laptop has been unproblematic for now which is pleasing but I do not wish to do the same thing on my desktop machine.  I'd much rather preserve my home folder with my KDE intact. 

This leads to my main concerns and questions:

1. The last time I had to reinstall pclos, I left Home intact.  When I booted into the new installation though, kde had issues with old files in my users directory such that it refused to log in to KDE at all.  I finally managed to log in by deleting the contents of my /tmp folder.  The issues, though, persisted such that my customised desktop was rather messed up & my theme would not function properly at all.  In the end I had to delete the .kde folder itself & start over.  So my question becomes then - what do I delete in advance (if anything) within the .kde folder to ensure my settings stick & I have reasonable expectation that my desktop/wm will work as before my migration?

2. If my kde does get fubared by some mischance, which folders within it provide my settings and can they be backed up & re-used on my Arch KDE DE when i'm done setting up Arch?  Is this inadvisable?  Would it be best at that point to just start KDE again as a so-called "blank slate" and then to reinstall my themes & tweaks by hand?

3. Are there any other folders or files that I should not re-use from my old pclos installation (I'm thinking of config files mostly) ?  Are there any that can be safely left intact on their relevant partitions so they   may be re-used when installing Arch or at least returned to their correct directories?  I ask this because I do have a separate /var, /usr & /tmp folder working with my current PCLOS installation.

Thank you
MS