Mageia 10

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Mageia 10

Postby lloyd » May 19th, '26, 15:53

My /home directory is on a separate partition. I'm planning to do a fresh install of M10 when the final version is done. Is it ok to just wipe out the .config directory rather than re-format the whole partition? (of course I will back it up first) I don't want any old files on there from M9.

Thank you.
lloyd
 
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Re: Mageia 10

Postby doktor5000 » May 19th, '26, 17:46

Hi there, those two basically contradict each other:
lloyd wrote:Is it ok to just wipe out the .config directory rather than re-format the whole partition?

I don't want any old files on there from M9.


There's not only configuration in .config but also in .local and many applications also have their own dedicated .folder
If you don't want old files in there, either create a new user and use that one, or reformat /home
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Re: Mageia 10

Postby maat » May 21st, '26, 16:09

Hello,

What you can do... let's assume your username is lloyd and the homedir is /home/lloyd :

1) Create an other user "mageiadmin" (it's always good to have an admin user for such tasks... usually i dedicate the first user created during install for that and with it i create my "normal" user but that's an other story :D )
2) log in with it and open a console
3) create a new homedir for lloyd and set lloyd as owner:
Code: Select all
su -c "mkdir /home/lloyd_new; chown lloyd:lloyd /home/lloyd_new"

3) move content of current lloyd homedir to the new dir :
Code: Select all
su -c "mv /home/lloyd/* /home/lloyd_new/"

4) Swap old and new directories :
Code: Select all
su -c "mv /home/lloyd /home/lloyd_old; mv /home/lloyd_new /home/lloyd"

4) log out and log in as lloyd as usual (same login, same password)

This way you will have a brand new un-customized home dir with all your files. And your "cleaned files" won't be very far => /home/lloyd_old

WARNING : you'll loose mozilla/firefox & thunderbird profiles and accounts which are hidden (name starting with a dot = not showed by default) => you'll find them in :
  • /home/lloyd_old/.thunderbird
  • /home/lloyd_old/.mozilla

If you have ssh keys you'll have to get back /home/lloyd_old/.ssh and its content
if you gave gpg keys you'll have to get them back too and i'm missing probably thing.

The cool part of my method : you keep your user name and you don't loose things...
The tedious part : you might have to get back things form the old directory...
maat
 
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