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Retaining old /home directories with a fresh install/upgrade.

Old home

When doing an install and selecting the option(s) to retain old /home directories you may run into permissions problems when you create a new user and tell Mepis to use the old home directory for the new username. Here's how I fixed it.

Here, I've created a new user name that matches the old /home directory. Using the Mepis User assistant, I have specified that the new user (rich) will use the existing directory (/home/rich) but an attempt to login will fail due to permissions problems so, as root on the command line do the following:
chown -hR rich /home/rich

This will recursively change the 'ownership' of all the contents of the existing directory to the new user id/user name. Obviously, change the user name and /home sub directory as appropriate for your system.

randomness