GHome Mover - Linux home folder mover

1. What is GHome Mover?

GHome mover is an easy-to-use application designed to carbon-copy a Linux user home directory from a specific user to another. This application also looks at the files for references to the old directory/user name and replaces with the references of the new dir/user. Ownership is also changed.

If you are a MS Windows user think on GHome Mover as the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" application.

2. How GHome Mover can be usefull to me?

GHome Mover will be excellent in this cases (examples):

- A corporate network administrator wants to create a pre-configured desktop for the employees. This desktop includes documents of the company, icons, shortcuts, links and configuration files. The administrator creates a single dir and personalizes it and then, with GHome Mover deploys it to all the machines in the network.

- A computer Geek has the username "megahacker2002" and we aren't at 2002 anymore so he creates a new username "megahacker2003" and with GHome Mover transports his configuration and personal home to the new home.

- Someone wants to create a backup of his files into another directory and knows that the standard linux coping tools don't make a good job so he uses the GHome Mover application.

3. How do I install it?

If you got a binary version (i didnt made any binary distributions) just install it using RPM or the Debian install packages.

With the source tarballs (.tgz file): Unpack it (please be sure that you are logged as a root user). Go to the directory and type: "./configure" then if there were no errors type "make" and then if everithing is allright type "make install". For more (and very detailed) information see the INSTALL text included with the source tarball.

NOTE: You will need development tools, Gnome devel libs 2.x and GTK 2.x devel libs installed to build the Tarball Version (RedHat Development with Gnome Development packages is fine). If you are trying to compile the GHome Mover Console Version, you don´t need the the Gnome and GTK Libs.

4. How do I use it?

This program has a quite simple and intuitive interface.

- Login as a "root" user if you want to change users at the /home/xxx directory (Its highly recommended login as a root user).
- Start the program (there should be an icon in your gnome menu , if not just search for "ghomemover" executable).
- Complete all the fields (even if you dont want to change the owner or group you must fill it).
REMEMBER! All the files in the DESTINATION directory WILL BE OVERWRITTEN!!!
- Click at the Begin button and follow the instructions.

The SMART option makes the program to ignore searching for strings to be replaced in files like JPG, MPG and GIF (there are more than 80 types registred in the program). It also ignores files bigger than 250KB (I don't thing there are configuration files bigger than this).

5. GHome Mover Console Version (for Scripting)

There is another version of GHome Mover avaliable - The GHome Mover Console Version. It was built using the Gnome Version engine but doesn't use the Gnome Graphical Interface so it can run on computers that does not have a GUI installed. This version is useful for building script applications.

Using this version is simple, just run it and you will see the command line parameters needed.

GHome Mover Console does not need any Gnome libs, X11 or GUI libraries to compile/run only the C development tools/libs.

5. Extra information and bugs

Known Bug: Incorrect replacement of references on binary files. The applications isn´t prepared (YET) to search and replace references on this file type. Using SMART will fix about 99% of the problems with that bug.

Other bugs and features: Take a look at the source code, there are functions that can be calibrated to your usage. This calibration is easy to be done (you don´t need to be an professional C programmer) and can tune your copy of GHome Mover to the perfection.

Files
Version
0.2
Platforms
Linux (any version)
File size
327KB
Screenshots

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