[clue-tech] same partition, multiple distros questions

[Christopher Cross]

Swap is not always OK because things like suspend to disk may use this
to store your system state. If you want to share swap it should be
fine as long as your suspend to disk is pointed to a file rather then
your swap space.

/boot should also be fine to share as long as your boot loader is
configured correctly for each distributions kernel and root path and.

/home may give you issues because of personal settings for different
versions of the same application. As long as your UIDs and GIDs match
up between distributions you should not have to much trouble with
/home/user but any change you make in one distribution to a users
personal settings will carry over and may be incompatible with
whatever version of whatever application is on the next distribution.
If you create unique users for each distribution you may get around
this but some users home directories could be left insecure because
the permissions will match another users UID. It is probably not worth
the headache it can cause.

Every other directory is going to have distribution specific things in
them. Binaries, libraries, and system settings that may not be
compatible between your chosen distributions will cause nothing but
problems.

With all that said, I just do not think sharing partitions on a
multi-boot system like this is worth much. If you want to share some
data then create a separate data partition.

Christopher Cross
g1ccross at gmail.com



On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Mike Bean <beandaemon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, I have a question for the group.  I've been thinking about partitioning,
> and experimenting on a desktop that doesn't have anything I'd consider
> valuable on it.  I got to trying this idea of sharing partitions, for
> example, mount a different logical part for /home, /root, etc...etc...  At
> first I even tried having both distros use the same boot.  (In retrospect,
> not my brightest moment.)  But I seriously came to wonder, Why couldn't they
> use the same swap?  System wouldn't run them both at the same time, so they
> wouldn't need to share!
>
> By product of all this experimentation, is that I've been getting lots of
> different kinds of errors of different forms,  things not initializing
> right.  Elements of the shell not initializing...etc....  I wanted to ask,
> which partitions can belong to more then one distro?  If any?  And does it
> need to be a physical or logical part?  I realize I could save myself allot
> of hassle if I'd pick one distro and just run it, but I tend to enjoy the
> linux buffet.  Sample a little of everything.
>
> To put this in perspective, the main schema I'd been using for most of the
> day.  #1) physical - 250mb /boot, #2) physical 2048mb swap, #3) logical
> 120GB root, #4) logical 500GB home,  #5 logical 120 GB root 2nddistro home
>
> Going to try to come to the meeting this month, seeing as how I spend all
> day working with ESX, it doesn't make sense for me to miss a clue meeting on
> virtualization!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike Bean
>
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