universal home partition??

[Steve Morris]

On 06/09/10 14:57, Errol Sapir wrote:
> On 09/05/2010 02:29 PM, claydoh at claydoh.com wrote:
>   
>>> I have a separate partition for /home. I only use a KDE desktop, and
>>> have exclusively used Kubuntu. After installing 10.04 I had several
>>> problems with Kubuntu as spoken about in the "impressions of Lucid"
>>> thread. I now want to try other distros that use KDE. Is there a way of
>>> keeping my same home partition for other distros? I'm not worried about
>>> the layout of my home partition but wouldn't want to loose my documents,
>>> e-mail etc.  I thought of maybe even having the other distro as a dual
>>> (triple) boot. I was thinking about trying Fedora or PClinuxos.
>>> Errol
>>>
>>> --
>>>      
>>>       
>> You are perfectly fine having a common /home directory, but if you intend
>> to use a common *username* across different distros, you most likely will
>> have ownership problems as different distros may assign a different user
>> *id* number that correlates to the user name. This could render you unable
>> to login with that username in another OS. Also, sharing a common username
>> between distros will also mess with your desktop layout, wallpapers, etc.
>> depending on what themes, images and default settings each OS has
>> installed And some distros may also store local configs in a different
>> folder (.kde4 instead of .kde for example). I recommend using different
>> usernames. you can easily copy config files between the different OS's.
>>
>> As for accessing documents, you should still be able to browse to them
>> fine, but a separate folder or partition for these file might be a good
>> idea so you can save them back.
>>
>> Clay
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>    
>>     
> Thanks all for the good advice, I realize now that what I should do is 
> have a "common file area" rather than a common home partition. I also  
> got similar help from the Kubuntu forum. See:
> http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3111871.0
>
> The only question I now have is how to have a common email program for 
> all the distros. I use Thunderbird and of course want to only have one 
> email repository. How do I do that?
> Errol
>
>   
Under account settings you have definition for local folders and your
isps mail interface. In local folders you have to specify the full path
to the directory where the local folders are and, under server settings
for your mail account you specify the full path to the directory
containing the relevant folders for that mail account. In my case the
lowest level directory for the mail account is the mail accounts pop
address, which is how thunderbird can easily distinguish between folders
for different mail accounts (I have an account provided by my isp and I
also have a google mail account). By default these paths point to
sub-directories of  ~/.thunderbird, but via the above mentioned settings
you can specify any path you like.

regards,
Steve

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