groupadd -g 1001 foo
useradd -u 1001 -g foo -G wheel,floppy,audio,cdrom,dialout,cdrw foo

     This  is the best way if you want to boot back and forth between OS
     versions,  you  have  files  with unexpected owners inside the home
     directories, or you have programs that refer to users by UID rather than
     name.

     Alternatively, you can just go with the new UIDs and switch the existing
     home directories with "chown -R USER.GROUP /home/USER". (Note that chown
     is going through a syntax change from "USER.GROUP" to "USER:GROUP"; you'll
     have to see which syntax your version supports.)

     (!) [Ben] Being the tool-using critter that I am, things like this (the
     word "manually", specifically) bring a shudder to the spine and a script
     to mind.

while read user x uid gid foo
do
        adduser --uid $uid --gid $gid $user
done < /mnt/hda/etc/passwd

     I suppose you could always put in a line that says

((uid+=1000))

     right below the 'do'.

     (!) [Thomas] This presupposes that the users were added with "adduser" to
     begin with (note that UIDs from 1000+ are indicative of this). But on some
     systems, UIDs > 499 are used as a valid starting place for normal user
     IDs.

     (!) [Ben] I was walking past a haberdashery and happened to see a nice hat
     in the window, so I extracted a '1000' from it. };> The number would have
     to  come from examining the password file on the current system and
     adapting the existing number range to what is available - obviously,
     there's no single 'right' answer. Sorry I didn't make that more explicit.

     Oh, and the '' in the '/mnt/hda' isn't the explicit version either.
     :)

   (?) What does the Answer Gang recommend, update or clean installation? 

     (!) [Thomas] An update.

     (!) [Neil] As you've noted a clean install requires you to set the whole
     system up again, whereas a good update should be seamless. Again as you
     note,  there may be circumstances where the update leaves the seams
     showing. A clean install will normally leave you with a nice consistent
     system, with any cruft that was in your configuration cleaned out and
     everything shiny and sparkly.

     Obviously, if you're changing distributions, rather than just changing
     versions of the same distribution then a clean install is the way to go.

     Personally I incline towards doing a clean install every so often. If
     you're only taking every 3rd release or so, then a clean install may be
     worth the effort, but if you're putting every release on, then I would
     alternate upgrades and clean installs, or even keep the clean installs to
     every 3rd release.

     In practice, I tend to have a number of old releases lying around in
     separate partitions, so I wipe an old partition and install there, then
     when I'm happy I've got it set up the way I like it, I copy /home across
     and change my default boot. This means I also have a number of old copies
     of my home directory left lying around.

   (?) b) managing /home etc. 

   I have read recommendations about distributing the various directories but
   assume that they only apply to environments with different physical drives
   (load-balancing). In this specific installation there is only one hard drive
   (at a time) involved. 

     (!)  [Thomas]  This "load balancing" concept is a marketing myth, a
     band-wagon of terminology that's thrown around the place which people
     latch on to.

     (!) [Neil] Generally, I think it's about reliability more than load
     balancing. The point being that if some eejit fills up one partition, e.g.
     /home, with junk, there's still space in the other partitions, e.g. /var
     and /tmp, for the system to go on about it's business until the problem is
     rectified. If it's all in one big partition the the whole system is likely
     to fail.

     In practice that's more applicable to big IT departments than simple home
     systems. At home I install everything in one big partition. It keeps
     things simple and I've had no problems with reliability, but I wouldn't
     recommend it for my work systems.

   (?) How can one best deal with update or install in order to avoid having to
   back up /home, waste the drive, install the software and then restore /home?
   
     (!) [Thomas] (see above about partitions and installation)

     (!) [Mike] For ease of use, put everything in one partition. To guard
     against disk I/O errors or stupid admins who don't look before they "rm
     -rf", put /boot, /home/ and /usr on separate partitions, make /boot and
     /usr readonly, and don't mount /boot by default. The reason is that if a