“From the bird’s eye view, migrating your settings and
“presence” to a completely new machine means taking stock of
everything locally-installed and customized at the system level
(namely application packages), determining the stock package-set
you need to replicate onto the new machine, isolating any specialty
applications like databases, and preserving your configuration and
settings (system-wide and personal). Obviously you need to migrate
your actual files, too, but that is hardly an unsolved problem. For
the moment we will just stick to the software and non-data portions
of the OS.