Tip To Upgrade or Reinstall Mepis Without Losing Browser and Email Settings
Posts: 1296
First - If you like installing new versions of Mepis and trying out the latest betas of Mepis, you can save your /home partition every time. There is an option in the Mepis Installation Center that allows you to keep your /home partition and not write over it when you install. This will allow you to save all your personal settings so that you don't have to reconfigure them every time you want to install Mepis again.
Second - You can save your browsers and email programs if you have them installed into your /home/yourname directory. If you like and use Mozilla and/or Mozilla Firefox browsers, you can download the zip files from mozilla.org and unzip them into your /home/yourname directory. Mozilla comes with a mozilla-installer file and you can install it in a terminal just by typing, as a user, ./mozilla-installer. After you unzip Firefox, you don't have to do anything else to use it. You just click on the firefox icon in that folder.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email because after you unzip it, you don't have to do anything else to use it. You have it saved in your /home/yourname directory so that whenever you install Mepis and save that directory, you don't have to worry about your emails and your email settings because they will still be in that program all the time. You can create desktop icons or panel icons for these programs to make it easier to open them. You can also edit your kmenu with the menu editor program and add these programs to the menu.
Using these programs and saving your /home partition will save you a lot of hassle whenever you install Mepis.
It's nice to know
Posts: 1296
that saving your /home directory from other Linux distros works with Mepis. 
Without Partition
Posts: 20
Even if /home is not on its own partition, it will save another distros /home directory? Then this is a pretty good thing.
Not sure about that
Posts: 1296
Herbert may have had his /home separate. Hopefully he will tell us. 
/home can be saved
Posts: 205
/home can be saved when you are doing an upgrade. The secret is that the entire partition is NOT initialized. Instead, only the packages are overwritten. if you wanted to retain any number of programs, data, or information, all you have to do prior to performing an upgrade is to populate that information somewhere beneath the /home directory and it would not get overwritten. The secret is to carefully examine the check boxes during installation and choose the right ones. They are not difficult at all to locate once you know to look for them, so now you know all you need to know to save data somewhere beneath /home. Isn't that easy?
-- Brian Masinick mailto:masinick@yahoo.com
This works extremely well. Wh
Posts: 4
This works extremely well. When I installed Mepis I installed it over Mandrake and told Mepis to install only root & swap. After the installation Mepis came up and everything in KDE, including my Opera configuration came up perfectly as if I had'nt just installed a new OS.
It was a beautiful sight! /home is the greatest thing since sliced bread.