Sharing /home partition in a multi-distro multi boot setup

firewiz87 · 08-23-2010, 10:07 PM

I am running openSUSE and Arch linux on my system with a commom /home partition. Both distros use KDE and the same users. The problem is that the kde settings of one distro gets mixed up with the other. I think the dot files in the user's home folder is the problem.

Is there a way to isolate the settings file of one distro from the other?? So that maybe each distro can access the settings in its corresponding folder in the user's home folder or something??

Or is there a better idea than using a common /home partition??

Thanks in advance for your replies...

Meson · 08-23-2010, 10:50 PM

Well... you could have a base /home directory and then a aufs mount, one for each distro...

Even easier, if the only thing you want to be distro specific is under a particular dir like .kde, you can have .kde-arch and .kde-suse and do a bind mount to .kde depending on the distribution.

John VV · 08-24-2010, 12:44 AM

suse and arch ? might? work together sharing ~/home ( it will be a pain in the "you know what" )
both use 1000 as a user id to start with

give it a go but BACK UP EVERYTHING

it might be much easier and better to share a DATA partition for photos,music,videos,...

firewiz87 · 08-24-2010, 01:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Meson

Well... you could have a base /home directory and then a aufs mount, one for each distro...

Even easier, if the only thing you want to be distro specific is under a particular dir like .kde, you can have .kde-arch and .kde-suse and do a bind mount to .kde depending on the distribution.

Sorry i didnt fully understand what you are saying... could u please elaborate???

Quote:

Originally Posted by John VV

suse and arch ? might? work together sharing ~/home ( it will be a pain in the "you know what" )
both use 1000 as a user id to start with

give it a go but BACK UP EVERYTHING

it might be much easier and better to share a DATA partition for photos,music,videos,...

It does work... SUSE n arch sharing the same home partition but i does have some irritating problems... like you change the wallpaper in one distro and the other shows a blank desktop. The firefox settings also create problems.

I am seriously considering data partiton... unfortunately the home folder does have a lot of data... so if there is an alternative... i'd definitely try it....

chickenjoy · 08-24-2010, 02:25 AM

Suggestion: having a ~/home/shared folder to be automounted on login OR defined in the fstab would save you the trouble of having system files being re-used and modified by each distro after each login.

this folder would contain the non-system data that you want to be seen on both distos.

Meson · 08-24-2010, 06:05 AM

Lets say you wanted a separate set of Desktop icons for each distribution. You would have a ~/Desktop-arch and ~/Desktop-opensuse. Then, at some point during boot you would have a command that did

Code:

mount --bind /home/firewiz87/Desktop-arch /home/firewiz87/Desktop

Taking that a step further, you could have two directories in your home directory, "arch" and "suse" Then, for example during the Arch boot

Code:

for d in ~/arch; do mount --bind $d ~/$d; done

catkin · 08-24-2010, 07:11 AM

Some relevant discussion in this LQ thread.