Gratitude to Perry Metzger for a twenty-minute phone call: my Linux box is now transferring /home/anton to the new Mac Mini with scp.
Later: Apparently /home/anton/.Trash contained a recursive link; the copy of my home directory ended up nine times as big as the original. And I can’t delete the lump, because its owner is wheel, an account which I did not create and whose password I therefore do not know. Does MacBSD as preinstalled have a superuser account with a standard password?
Later still: Perry to the rescue again (he saw this post!). I needed to say sudo bash rather than su. Twenty-seven gigabytes of color glossy emptiness have appeared.
Anton, I don’t know about the password. There is certainly a root password that you could use and that has rights above those of wheel, but to transfer, you could try this:
linux$ cd; tar cvzf – | ssh user@macmini tar xvzf –
This would use tar to transfer files from one machine to the other. There are ways to do that with cpio, too.
Regards.
Andre