Separate partitions for email and webbrowsing

[Tim Littlemore]

alex wrote:
> I have multiple versions of ubuntu installed and have a problem with 
> maintaining continuity in email.
> Each ubuntu is configured somewhat differently except they all have 
> the same version of Thunderbird with identical mailboxes but their 
> contents are different so the threads are divided up betweem the 
> multiple ubuntus.
>
> I was thinking of having a separate partition dedicated to Thunderbird 
> and perhaps another for Firefox so that whatever email is received by 
> one of the ubuntus will be available to the other 
> ubuntus.....something like havimg a /home partition shared between two 
> linuxes.
>
> Is this a harebrained idea or is it workable?   If it sounds OK, how 
> would be done?
>
>
> elmo aka alex
I do something similar to this. I have a partition called /data that I 
store information on that will be required by various distributions. 
Then I just create symlinks to this partition from my home directories 
on each distro.

E.g.:
cd ~tim
ln -s /data/.thunderbird .thunderbird
ln -s /data/.mozilla-firefox .mozill-firefox

I then just repeat this on each distro. Obviously, the 
/data/.thunderbird & /data/.mozilla-firefox directories contain all the 
relevant data.

I do this with my Documents folder and my MP3s too. If I have any issues 
with my user ID being different on different distros, I just create a 
'data' group on each distro, ensure it has the same GID on each one and 
add my user to this group. I then make sure that the data group has full 
permissions on the /data partition.

Tim