I am not expert but thought I would share the ideas of how to save some time if you choose to delete all contents of your porteus/changes folder or directory. Experts won't need to do this. Lets ignore reasons for wiping it and move on.
I login as guest and want to save some time to re-establish my old settings. These old settings must be saved or backup to your backup folder for the scripts to work.
In other words, you do have to some things like click on preferences for your terminal, text editor, file manager etc and make and save those changes
Then you have to copy various folders to your backup.
Outside your system, I use /mnt/sda3 I have a folder called 1bak meaning backups with various sub-folders including Keep.
at 1bak I have 2 scripts. Because folder 1bak is outside Porteus file system, its always there until hard drive corruption etc.
If you login as root, first script might work, but you are more likely to combine into one script.
contents of my-setup.sh
Because I dont login as root I also have a my-root.sh#!/bin/sh
cd ~
cp -fR /mnt/sda3/1bak/.config ~
cp -fR /mnt/sda3/1bak/Desktop ~
cp -R /mnt/sda3/1bak/firefox ~
ln -s /mnt/sda3/1bak/ bak
ln -s /mnt/sda4/1VIDEO/ video
ln -s /mnt/sda4/1SOUND sound
ln -s /mnt/sda3/porteus/optional/ optional
ln -s /mnt/sda3/porteus/modules/ modules
I have made changes to the 2 Slackware mirror files, to use aussie mirrors#!/bin/sh
if [ -d /mnt/live/memory/images/google-chrome-39.0.2171.65-x86_64-bundle.xzm ] ; then
chmod 4755 /opt/google/chrome/chrome-sandbox
fi
cd /mnt/sda3/1bak/Keep
cp -f rc.local /etc/rc.d/
cp -f shadow /etc/
cp -f mirrors* /etc/usm/
usm -u usm
# ^^ in case you have deleted the module
usm -u all
On first reboot from a wiped changes folder my root pw is toor but I have amended it and the shadow file holds my old passwd change.
usm stuff still takes time, but save me typing it all.
These are examples of what I do, make your own changes to suit your set up.
YMMV and I still prefer to do some changes manually.
reboot to see if all changes are effective.