[single /home partition for many distros or versions?]

[Goh Lip]

Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> It would appear that on Sep 16, Perry did say:
> 
>> P.S.
>> I hope this answers your question, but I have one of my own, slightly 
>> disgressing from the original topic of this thread:
>> It is highly recommended to mount a separate /home partition (as opposed to 
>> have it automatically created under / on the same partition), 
>> *but can you use a single /home partition for many distros or versions?*
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> All right, I'll bite, this is after all what I do... Although it has
> been done, I myself don't recommend doing it that way. Especially if
> your running different distros with different version levels of the
> same software installed.
> 
>> If you proceed thus, some settings you do on one distro are written in /home 
>> (.kde, .config) and would affect the other distro, wether you like it or not. 
>> And there could (???) be conflicts or incompatibilities.
> 
> Exactly! 
> 
>> Another way to go would be to create instead of /home, a "/perso" partition to 
>> mount onto any system you boot into, but some very personnal stuff like your 
>> mail,  addressbook and calendar will not be copied to this partition (I think 
>> Linux could be improved in that respect).
>> Someone has some experience in this regard?
> 
> I currently run 3 linux distros on my laptop:
> 
> Kubuntu Jaunty on /dev/sda5
> OpenSuSE 11.0 on /dev/sda6
> Sabayon 4.2 on /dev/sda7
> 
> I maintain a manually updated grub partition on /dev/sda3
> I have a small vfat partition on /dev/sda2
> I permit a very rarely booted copy of vista to exist on /dev/sda1
> 
> And I have something like that /perso on /dev/sda8 
> 
> Which since I only need to provide the personal partition for one user 
> (which happens to be jtwdyp) I mount it on /home/jtwdyp/com on all
> three of my linux distros. But I could just as easily have configured
> it to be /common. And then had a /common/jtwdyp & perhaps a /common/perry.
> Which model I'll use for any further explanation...
> Either way, to make it work every user involved must have the same
> user id number on each and every linux you expect this to work with.
> It's best if each user is assigned to the same primary group id number on
> each linux as well. Though I'll confess I failed to maintain that some
> time ago and it hasn't hurt me yet...
> 
> I don't use a "calendar" application so I can't say how well that can
> be shared across the applications. I use alpine for my mail, which I
> keep in local folders. My mail is retrieved via fetchmail using procmail
> as an mda which it processes and stores in mail folders under ~/mail
> However since I moved ~/mail to my personal partition directory
> which using the /common/user model would be
> /common/jtwdyp/mail
> Then by creating symbolic links such as:
> 
> ln -s /common/jtwdyp/mail /home/jtwdyp/mail
> 
> If your mail client insists on using ~/Mail instead of ~/mail you
> could perhaps use something like:
> 
> ln -s /common/perry/Mail /home/perry/Mail
> 
> In this way, with each of the Linux distros, no mater which one I'm
> running, alpine uses the same mail files I  tried to do the same with alpine's
> ~/.addressbook & ~/.pinerc files but it kept insisting on replacing
> the symlinks with hard files so instead whenever I make changes, I copy
> the new versions to the common partition. And then I can copy them
> back into the other linux's ~/ dir the next time I boot them.
> 
> In a similar manner any application that lets the user configure where
> the user files should be written, can be configured to use a directory
> that actually resides on the common partition. And/or using more symlinks
> such as:
> 
> ln -s /common/jtwdyp/my_documents /home/jtwdyp/my-documents
> ln -s /common/jtwdyp/images /home/jtwdyp/images
> ln -s /common/jtwdyp/lyxfiles /home/jtwdyp/lyxfiles
> etc...
> 
> Though It can pose a problem when the different distro's have different
> versions of the same application which has changed it's file formats...
> In example the LyX document processor has fairly recently made a major
> revision in the format of it's .lyx files.
> 
> This was annoying because I keep my .lyx files in my common partition. 
> Sabayon was the first of my distro's to automatically convert .lyx files
> from the lyxformat 276 used by LyX 1.5.6 (which until I upgraded to
> Jaunty was what apt-get gave me on Kubuntu) into the lyxformat 346 used
> by LyX 1.6.x...
> 
> So If I wanted to open the same .lyx files from the other distro's I had
> to first use the lyx2lyx script from the newer LyX 1.6.x version to
> convert them back... But eventually Kubuntu caught up, and since it's
> rare that I want to run LyX on the outdated OpenSuSE installation, I
> don't really need to bother anymore...
> 
> I've learned that firefox doesn't like me to try to play with it's
> bookmarks folder. So I use the export and import bookmark functions
> to initially set them up, And I keep a text file on my personal
> partition where I paste any url I might want to add to the other
> bookmark folders. 
> 
> Hope this helps...
> 


Sorry if this is a resend, Have to check my email settings..

I have quite a similar setup as Joe, I have 1 partition to keep my 
files, like the /persona partition mentioned above and another which is 
like a shared home. In the shared home, the files is s-linked to various 
distros, but since start of kde4, and I maintain kde3 as well, I had to 
convert email to thunderbird to keep compatibility. I don't have any 
problem (bookmarks, addons or flash) with firefox even if they are of 
different versions. No problem either with chromium. (the 64 bit is 
fast, small, like opera, but opera is incompatible with many websites). 
You can try to s-link from the shared home some lib, etc or var files 
but be careful and backup first. These help in reinstalling some 
applications. Note that when I install any OS, the shared home and 
/persona partitions are not part of the installation process. After 
installation, modify fstab to mount automatically  these partitions and 
s-link relevent files.

I also have a dedicated grub2 partition which boots up every OS, so if I 
change or modify anything in any distro, there is no boot problem or 
bootup to old kernel issue.

Hope this info helps.

Regards,
Goh Lip