[plug] shared /home for dual-booting two distros

[Richard Meyer]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 18:29 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 17:49 +0800, Meyer wrote:
> > 
> > ---- Original Message ----
> > From: sales at evolutions.com.Au
> > To: plug at plug.org.au
> > Subject: RE: [plug] shared /home for dual-booting two distros
> > Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 17:03:28 +0800
> > 
> > >This a newbie-ish question ;-)  Is it feasible to share one /home
> > >with
> > >two distros?
> > 
> > Yes!!
> 
> -snip-
> 
> > Yes, but seeing you're keeping the distro secret we can't tell you
> > exactly how. ;-)
> 
> Oh alright, if you must know I've been using FC3 (now FC4) but now I'm
> trying out SuSE and am seriously considering swapping ;-)  I've tried a
> few others, but SuSE does it for me at the moment :-).  Mostly, I like
> the range of apps that it comes with so I don't have to endure lots of
> extra downloads on dialup.  Then there is the very logical way that the
> distro is organised, yadayada ...

If you reinstall, where SUSE asks you about partitioning, just click on
advanced, and click on a partition you want for root and tell it to
format it, then click on a partition that you want for /home and tell it
not to format it (the default is "No" if the partition is already
formatted with the filesystem you wanted.
> 
> > Yes you could get yourself horribly tangled up between releases of
> > KDE, Evolution, Firefox, maybe even OOo, and I was going to mention
> > it. If you DO want to mount your /home to another distro, it might be
> > a good idea to create your username on distro2 to be something
> > different to the username on distro1.
> 
> Thanks, Richard.  That's a suggestion that I hadn't thought about.
> Also, thanks for confirming the complexity of it all :-(  OTOH, for this
> 'trial' period dual-booting 2 distros, I will probably just copy across
> any files/docs/spreadsheets/etc that I generate in one /home - or just
> access them as needed from each partition to do work on them.  I had
> this fanciful notion that I could simplify things with one /home, but
> the mechanics of it aren't worth it.

It's not complicated - you just mount /home at installation and when it
asks for a user, you say "gavin2" instead of just "gavin" - you can even
have the same numerical IDs - no worries. it's just that the two
different directories in /home will simplify Charlie Foxtrots between
the two sets of applications and their .* files in ~

Of course YMMV if you have a partition formatted with say Reiser version
10 and then try to mount it on a distro that only has Reiser version
1.  ;-)   - and for those who are a bit strange, this is not an
announcement of Reiser Version 10 - it's an exaggerated
illustration. :-)
> 
> Gavin.

-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>
My Hovercraft is full of eels.
   --Monty Python's Flying Circus

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