[clue-tech] same partition, multiple distros questions

[Mike Bean]

As I sit here and really think about the subject, I think the way to go may
be to just use different filesystems and keep to one distro on my laptop.  I
find myself oddly wondering,  If I do create different filesystems for
different distros, who's to say I couldn't sym-link 'ln -s' the files from
my Fedora home to the Ubuntu one?

Mike Bean

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:15 PM, Christopher Cross <g1ccross at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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> > clue-tech at cluedenver.org
> > http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech
> >
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