I'm about to do a fresh install of 10.10 Desktop on my work PC.
I previously had 10.04 and I had the /home of our main server mounted to /mnt/home. I remember back then I had to change my local user id to match that used on the id of my user on the remote server, so I will have the correct permissions to all my files.
My question is whether I can set this id during the setup or must I do it post installation (effectively changing the automatically assigned id).
Also, is that the best practice to work on a mounted location or is there anything more elegant?
Preseeding can be used with the Alternate CD to specify several parameters of the initial user, including the UID; this might work with the regular Desktop CD as well (GUI installer).
Concerning the ID matching between client and server, this really depends on the protocol that is being used to share the files over the network: NFS usually requires matching UID on the client and server; SMB/CIFS does not (but it requires an additional "login" step when you mount the remote filesystem). NFS is traditionally used in UNIX environments, while SMB/CIFS is the (only) network filesystem available on Windows hosts (by default).