How to upgrade to new version

[lotech]

Can I save my config on external driver ie. USB stick, and then install a new version of Knoppix and copy back the old config, so that I don't have to re-config everything ?

[Cuddles]

lotech,

Two thoughts, some of this comes from the knowledge I have gained from others, and some from my own experiences...

( 1 ) If you are booting off the Live CD, you can set up a "Persistant Home", on one of those "alternate" storage areas, and point the new Live CD version over to that same persistant home.
( 2 ) If you have hard drive installed the "old" version, either create the /home area on a sperate partition from the Operating System partition -=- and set your "new" version of install to use that "old" versions /home partition, OR, copy the /home folder, with all of its permissions, and contents, over to that "alternate" storage area, install the "new" version, then copy back the saved /home folder to the "new" installs /home location, and be sure to set up the users, and change permissions of these users within the /home folder... i.e. /home/cuddles should have owner and group permissions of the user "cuddles", you will want to ensure that you have done: chown -R cuddles /home/cuddles and a chgrp -R cuddles /home/cuddles -=- this will need to be done for all the users that reside in the /home folder - you will also want to do a adduser of these users before doing the chown and chgrp commands, so they get set properly.

Either of these two situations have some issues; new versions of a OS may not like the old versions configuration files. This depends on how different, and spaned, the versions are from each other. e.g. Knoppix v3.2 vs Knoppix v3.8 - lots of things could have changed between these two versions, and some of the configuration files may not work the same. If your versions are "close" to each other, like v3.8.1 and say, v3.8.2 - not much would have changed... The worst case situation, if your versions are majorly different, is, that some configurations wont work, or seem to be retained, and will need to be re-configured -=- AFAIK.

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles
PS: Best advice I can give you, if you plan on doing a lot of new version installs, is, make yourself a seperate partition for your /home -=- that way, when you do a new version install, the OS changes, but the /home area is retained - even the adduser command is smart enough to know if the new user being added already has a /home/user location, not to overwrite and delete it first, it will re-use the existing location already there.