I am nervously reviving an old instance of Linux Mint on a fresh install of the latest Debian 12 Bookworm. The Mint is about four or five years old and its /home folder is backed up on another drive in the Desktop tower.
There are these instructions -
Mapping the home folder to a different location in fstab
It appears you can either change the relevant /home line in /etc/fstab to where the desired folder is then reboot or otherwise there is a command :
sudo usermod --home /mnt/store/hd2/linux-home --move-home joe
The fstab option sounds cleaner and safer somehow. At least in my case unlike the OP in that other question, I'm only dealing with different Linux distros, there's no Windows involved.
There is a complication that the old Mint and new Debian are in different European languages.
Intuitively it looks like the systems can work it out because they both have a file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs which in a rather intuitive way appears to map the standard user folders to their names in whatever European / human language. The thing is, the Debian one also has ~/.config/user-dirs.locale with a hyphenated four character locale code in it but Mint, at least from four or five years ago, did not have that.
Once I installed a fresh Debian into the system partition and it automatically took care of language changes of all the user folders. In this case with Mint and Debian I'm worried what will happen. Greatest fear is of course losing or corrupting data.
Are there any tips for getting this old /home directory from an old Mint into this fresh Debian? In particular does one need to make any manual editing of how the two distros handle locale?
localefile is an XML type file that's human readable. Have you looked at it? – eyoung100 Feb 13 '24 at 22:37