In my last post, which was a while ago, I went over how I installed Peppermint OS onto my Acer Aspire laptop. On that article, I had some instructions on how to do it that I need to update.
The issue was, whenever I edited the /etc/fstab file and mounted it with the old home files on that disk by rebooting, the new distro’s desktop would be replaced with the last instance of the desktop look, feel, and panel/dock that I had on the previous install of that desktop environment’s config files. But I figured our a way that is more efficient than what I presented the last time. Here are the main changes that I have to offer to what I wrote in How I Installed Peppermint OS PCNetSpec Edition onto a Computer with a Separate Disk as the Home Directory
You should do these steps before you update and upgrade the system. One of the first things you should do is to edit the fstab file in the /etc directory, before much changes happen to your current home directory after an install. It doesn’t matter whether you do these steps before or after you edit the fstab file and set it to use your drive for a home directory. If you do edit the fstab file before you do this, just make sure you don’t reboot until you’ve done the following steps:
After mounting the old disk on /mount/rick/myhome as instructed in the second set of steps, look for point #4 of the above referenced article, go to the config directory where your desktop files are configured. This is normally at ~/.config/(desktop directory). If you are doing this on a peppermint install, that would be the XFCE DE. But I believe these steps would work for most DEs, However, I’ve only tested this on XFCE thus far. Note, I will use my own disk’s label and directory below. Make sure you use your own directory for your setup. Enter:
cd /media/$USER/myhome/$USER/.config
cp -r ~/.config/* ./ This will effectively copy all config files over to your disk myhome mount.
With that steps done, you are now ready to reboot into your system, assuming you have already edited the fstab file to mount the new disk to /home. Otherwise, you’ll need to edit and add the disk info as detailed in the above article to switch your home directory to the disk it is on. Then you will be ready to sudo reboot!
That’s all you have to do to save the settings on a newly installed distro with an XFCE desktop environment.
Also, in my original article, I have some instructions on how to access the blkid app when it isn’t in the path of the user, by adding that path to the users current path variable, which you can check by entering echo $PATH into a terminal.You will be looking for the /usr/sbin directory, specifically, that is where the program resides.
Or, you may wish to not add that directory path to the $Path variable. You can still run the program by adding “sudo” to the beginning of the command, like this:
sudo blkid
Enter your password in and then it will run the app and you can do the same to reboot the computer from the command line in a terminal--sudo reboot or you can use the DE’s logout function.
If you did not run any of the programs on your new system, the files you copy from your “new” home directory will be the settings for the current desktop environment to your “old” home directory. will overwrite past settings for the specific distro onto your soon-to-be home directory, thus preserving the distro’s settings. If you wish to save certain settings from your old home directory, I would suggest copying the whole .config directory to a backup directory:
mkdir ~/.old-config && cp -r ~/.config/* ~/.old-config
You can, of course, use whatever naming scheme you wish for the backup directory.
Then proceed with the home directory instructions and your own tweaks to the system.
