On 19/12/06 05:08 +0000, Vickram Crishna wrote: <snip>

If this is a completely trivial question, please do mail me back offlist, anyone who can guide me ensure that neither settings nor stuff like mailboxes get lost (this is the computer my wife uses, and my life will be at stake).

This is pretty much a FAQ, but for the sake of completeness, here goes:

Unix systems have the conecpt of a user "home" directory. This is the place where you start from when you log in. This is usually represented by the character ~.

Applications have their configurations in "dot" files (the file names start with a .) in the user home directory.

Global configuration information like passwords or system wide configuration files go into /etc.

Normally, mail is stored in ~, but you may also find it being stored in your mail spool directory (/var/mail or /var/spool/mail on Linux systems, mostly).

In the case of RH, home directories are under /home, so as long as you back that up, you should have most of your customisations. Keep in mind that version changes can affect configuration files or directories, particularly in the case of application suites like GNOME and KDE.

For most people though, backing up ~ and /var/spool/ should save system state. A backup of /etc/ is advisable as well, _particularly_ /etc/X11. If you are switching distros, you should recreate your users manually (or script it using chpasswd(8)). Then after you have restored /home, run 'chown -R user: /home/user/' as root, where user is to be substituted by the appropriate user name.

Devdas Bhagat