[clue-tech] Sharing Home directory with different distributions

[Collins Richey]

On 8/6/06, Michael Fierro <biffster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/6/06, Jed S. Baer <thag at frii.com> wrote:
>
> > > I am thinking of installing (at least) a couple of distributions on my
> > > laptop and sharing my home directory (on its own partition) between
> > > them. Is there anything that I should be aware of or watch out for when
> > > I do this?
> >
> > RC files. Other "preferences" files, particularly Gnome and KDE. Version
> > incompatibility could very well cause trouble.
>
> Or, at the very least, some super-strange behavior. As long as you
> make sure that the versions of all the apps/environments you run are
> the same in the various distributions, then you may still be okay.
>
> Though I personally still wouldn't risk it. :)
>

Actually, this is not too difficult to do (read: brain dead simple)
and quite reliable. What you need is a two-step setup. A small
/home/<userid> for each distro that symlinks to a much larger /data
(for want of another name) partition for shared storage. Each distro
stores its hidden files and Desktop directory and ??? (these are
distro and release dependant) directly in the /home/<userid> area, and
you create one or more symlinks in each that points to /data/?????,
example

'mkdir data'
'ln -s /data data'
'mkdir public_html'
'ln -s /data/public_html public_html'.
etc.,etc.

/data can be mounted in fstab or automounted, your preference.

When creating new files that you want to share, be sure to 'cd data'
first. The only tricky piece is to insure that each user on each
distro has the same uid/gid setting. You may need to adjust this after
the fact. Some distros start with uid 500, 1000, etc. You need to
unify thie uid/gid scheme to avoid permissions problems.
Alternatively, you could create /data as owned by a common group,
insure that the gid is common, and make your user on each distro a
member of the common group.


Some people even use this scheme to support multiple users, ie
/home/<userid> symlinks to /data/<userid> to support automatically
mounted partitions on a san, etc.

I've done this before, but I failed to redo the setup at my last crash <frown>.

Enjoy,

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.