Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
Gary,
I'm referring to the files that reside in the /home directory but are normally not visible to the user as their name starts with a dot. So, yes .bashrc could be an example. I'm not in front of that machine now but I can remember .wine, .VirtualBox, .opera, .mozilla, .gconf (or similar).
David
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Hi David,
Very good.
As you will be aware, the dot files in an individual user's directory are
meant to be specific and configurable to that user.
What's more, one or more dot files are sometimes associated with a
an executable utility program.
For example, you might have a .mozilla directory that contains files
associated with a Firefox browser that will contain your bookmarks,
browsing history, cache and what not.
So by way of example, in the case of the dot files in a .mozilla directory,
if you were to share them between invocations of a Firefox browser
on different versions of an OS, they have a strong likelihood of working
if you used a version of Firefox that is the same or newer than one
that created them, but may not be backwardly compatible with an earlier
version of Firefox.
As an another example, the semantics of the bash shell has not changed
much in recent years, so a .bashrc file from some earlier version of bash
has a very strong probability of working today.
What would tend to be more problematic are configuration files associated
with desktop environments. Desktops tend to have a higher amount of
work going on and associated changes that could mean the configuration
files created by an earlier version of the desktop might not operate with
a newer version and vice versa. In which case the remedy may be to
simply blow away those config files and let the desktop create them afresh.
It may help to keep clear in your mind the separation between the Linux
kernel and device drivers and things like the desktop and various utilities.
That separation is somewhat murkier in operating systems such as Windows
where one never normally operates it without the Window's desktop interface
running.
As you are aware, on Linux/Unix you can boot up just on a single dumb
terminal but to progress beyond that you really need at least a shell
command line interpreter such as bash. In fact until the first windowing
systems were devised, sitting in front of teletypes running a shell was
all we Unix users had.
All editions of Linux have at their heart the same kernel, albeit perhaps a different version,
but all ancestrally related. The desktop environment is what might distinguish, say, Mint from Unity.
Since the desktop is just an executable and nothing to do with the kernel,
from a computer engineering point view, we don't regard them as different versions of Linux.
The point I am trying to make is that even if all your dot files were missing
or were incompatible, you can always get yourself out of trouble with
nothing more than the root password and a command line prompt.
None of those dot files are associated with the operating system themselves.
So if you were to share the same dot files and something went amiss,
you should be able to recover.
Hope this helps.
Best regards
Gary
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