Re: [gentoo-user] Re: help

[Stroller]

On 20 Mar 2010, at 21:28, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> ...
>> So, I had to create a new profile, copy the good stuff over to fix
>> the
>> issue with Seamonkey. Now I can send a new message and it not be
>> blank.
>> I think it annoyed the list but it really got on my nerves. After
>> all,
>> who wants to spend 20 or 30 minutes typing in a message to have it
>> disappear and have to do it all over again.
>
> And people still claim it's Microsoft products that are bugged... :P

Chances are that he's copied a setting from his old profile that  
doesn't work with the new one, or is corrupt in some way. He can  
EASILY test this by moving his profile to profile.old and trying with  
a blank / new configuration. If that works then he can copy over only  
the essential parts of his profile and at least save himself all the  
bother of retyping out the names of his pop3 servers and signatures.

I was very impressed by Windows 7 recently. I installed it for a  
customer and it seems wonderful. I even considered trying it myself,  
but I realised that the inability to copy settings from one profile or  
machine to another is a *complete* deal-breaker to me.

I reinstall the o/s on my desktop machine at 1 - 3 year intervals.  
That might be caused by a hardware upgrade or failure, filesystem  
corruption, or they might just release Windows 8 in 2012. I try not to  
depend too much on stuff that's on my desktop - email is a killer app  
for me, so I just type in the details of my IMAP server and my  
familiar environment is replicated; I have just a few favourite  
websites that I use a lot, and one can just install a word-processor  
and photo-editor, there should be a backup of my data on the server.

When I set up a new Mac on Linux box, all my preferences from ~ can be  
copied over easily. They're just a bunch of text files, and I can have  
a bit of a clean up by only copying the preferences for programs I  
actually use. If I fire up $application and find that its layout is  
all wrong, then I can just exit it and copy across preferences from  
the old system,

Contemplating this, I find it a bit incredible that there's no way to  
do this on a Windows system. Everything is stored in honking great big  
registry files, and there's no way to migrate a registry hive to a new  
profile (and no way, without a Windows domain server, to migrate a  
profile to a new system). When I was a Windows enthusiast, before I'd  
heard of Linux, I would spend 2 days fuzting to try and get everything  
right when reinstalled Windows or installed a new system. Even a week  
or two later I'd be finding things that weren't quite right, like they  
were on my old system, didn't quite match my preferred way of doing  
things, and I would have to spend time tinkering to get them right.

A Red Hat developer recently (within the last 3 months, I guess)  
blogged about reverse engineering the Windows registry for some VM  
tools he wrote. I can't find the article right now, but what he had to  
say about the Registry was shocking.

Stroller.