Thank you all for the replies.

I ended up copying over my home directory, and repeating a
bit of software installation and configuration in order to
skip a full clobber of the root directory.

.Xauthority was automatically generated when I started X.

I use all the same .ssh keys on both machines. Is that a
mistake? <glances over shoulder>

No lilo at the moment. I liked it because it was so
small, not adding much conceptually to my system.

A reboot shows that I'm using grub on my notebook.
For some reason I have rEFInd booting my home machine.
(Oh, that was after already using it to boot linux on
an intel imac.)

Thanks to Devuan maintainers working behind the scenes
to make Debianized software available with the init
technology of our choice.

No news has been excellent news for my day-to-day
productivity.


On Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 03:52:27PM -1000, Joel Roth via Dng wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I've made a few changes to the OS configuration of my home
> machine. Rather than try to reproduce those changes
> one-by-one on my laptop, I'm thinking of restoring a backup.
>
> Looking at my (self-written) backup utility, I find this
> comment.
>

>     do not overwrite when porting to another machine

>

>     /etc/fstab
>     /etc/modules/
>     /boot 
>     /etc/lilo.conf

>
> Do you have any comments, suggestions about what all
> to avoid clobbering?
>
> Thank you very much!
>
>
> --
> Joel Roth
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--
Joel Roth