one home folder for more then one distro?

Shadowmeph · 09-21-2008, 01:26 AM

Ihave been installing a couple of different distros of linux, and am wondering if I could have one home folder for all the distros or would this create a problem?

billymayday · 09-21-2008, 01:43 AM

Not a great idea, since your home stores a lot of application and environment settings

Simon Bridge · 09-21-2008, 01:44 AM

Yes and... yes.

You give /home it's own partition.
Tell subsequent installs that this is /home, but not to format it.

Trouble comes when you have different configurations on different distros, the hidden files will be different. An obvious case is when one distro uses KDE and another Gnome. The more similar the distros are, the less of a problem this is. But then - if the distros are so alike, why bother multi-booting?

scott_R · 09-21-2008, 01:57 AM

You can, and it might. Nice answer, huh?

It's been a while since I played with a lot of distros (late 90s), but it's entirely possible to share a /home directory (which wouldn't be a directory, but a separate partition, to keep it safe from formats and such), and often an advantage, as you've guessed. No sense having to mount extra partitions and have stuff spread all over the place. On the other hand, if you have a highly tweaked distribution, expected directories can be all over the place, and they wouldn't match up with the directories another distribution might look for, namely with those '.configuration' files in your home directory. A way around this would be to use different user names for distributions that cause problems, or stick with distributions of a certain pedigree (e.g. all Ubuntu based, all Redhat/Fedora based, etc.)

It can be a little extra work, you'll need to do some extra work using the 'custom install' portions of your installer/partitioner, such as tell it to use, but not to create the /home directory. And perhaps it might be a good idea to have a "main" distribution you use as your main system, and then create extra partitions exclusively for the other distros you're testing. That way even if you FUBAR the /home, you're not going to be dead in the water.

Mostly it'll take trial and error and lots of mistakes, but once you get the hang of it, it's a nice option to have, especially when you decide to move to a new "main" distribution, it can save a lot of work moving files around. Just don't expect it to be effortless and trouble free, because if you test a fair number of distributions you're going to have (usually minor, but annoying) issues here and there. Most distros are pretty decent about this, especially if they stick to the LSB (linux standard base) ideals, and put files in common places.

Hope this helps.

pixellany · 09-21-2008, 08:08 AM

Better to have a shared data partition and then make links as appropriate into the /home directory for each distro.

Shadowmeph · 09-21-2008, 11:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

Better to have a shared data partition and then make links as appropriate into the /home directory for each distro.

Thank you for your replies

I am fairly new to this what do you mean by Data partition and is there instructions somewhere on how to do this?

pixellany · 09-21-2008, 02:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shadowmeph

Thank you for your replies

I am fairly new to this what do you mean by Data partition and is there instructions somewhere on how to do this?

Any partition can be used for data. This is what happens if you have just ONE partition, or if you have a separate /home partition.

"Data partition" = any partition which you decide to use only for data. Here is just one way to do it:

Create the partition---eg with fdisk or cfdisk
Create a filesystem (I use ext3 for everything**) using mkfs
Create a mount point in /mnt using mkdir
mount the new partition to the mount point
Link the mount point into your /home/username directory

Here's an example of the exact commands. (Username fred, data partition = /dev/sda6, mount point /mnt/data, link = Mydata)

Code:

su
mkdir /mnt/data
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda6
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/data
cd /home/fred
ln -s /mnt/data Mydata

Once you are happy with the setup, you can make the mounting permanent by adding an entry to /etc/fstab

**I use ext3 for all shared data partitions. On the rare ocassion that I boot into windows, I access the ext3 partitions using the ext2fsd driver.

Shadowmeph · 09-23-2008, 01:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

Any partition can be used for data. This is what happens if you have just ONE partition, or if you have a separate /home partition.

"Data partition" = any partition which you decide to use only for data. Here is just one way to do it:

Create the partition---eg with fdisk or cfdisk
Create a filesystem (I use ext3 for everything**) using mkfs
Create a mount point in /mnt using mkdir
mount the new partition to the mount point
Link the mount point into your /home/username directory

Here's an example of the exact commands. (Username fred, data partition = /dev/sda6, mount point /mnt/data, link = Mydata)

Code:

su
mkdir /mnt/data
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda6
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/data
cd /home/fred
ln -s /mnt/data Mydata

Once you are happy with the setup, you can make the mounting permanent by adding an entry to /etc/fstab

**I use ext3 for all shared data partitions. On the rare ocassion that I boot into windows, I access the ext3 partitions using the ext2fsd driver.

thanks for the instructions . Can you give me an example of something that you would put into the data folder?