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

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 19:00 +0800, Richard Meyer wrote:
> 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
> > > 

-snip-

> 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.

I thought I had done it that way, but didn't seem to work :-/  Maybe I
didn't get it right.

> > > 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. :-)

I realised that would be an issue, so I forced SuSE to use Fedora's
default of ext3 to avoid compatibility issues that may or may not have
arisen ;-).  I'll try the install again - following your suggestions.
Thanks. 

Gavin.