Multiple Distros - One /home

[Paul Trevethan]

On Sat, 2009-11-07 at 01:03 -0500, Mike McMullin wrote: 
> On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 16:23 -0500, Brian McKee wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Cristopher Thomas <crisnoh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > How much trouble would I be making for myself if I attempted to have a
> > > shared /home partition for a dual boot of two separate distros?  Is this
> > > even possible?
> > 
> > It's possible, but the differences in the settings files between
> > different versions of gnome for example could quickly cause issues or
> > at least confusion.
> > 
> > What I'd do if I wanted something like that is make a partition for
> > the standard folders inside of home
> > e.g. put Documents, Desktop, Pictures etc on a separate partiton, and
> > symlink them into the home folder of each distro.
> 
>   This makes sense, but... what about conflicting UID's?
> 
> > The settings I'd be worried about sharing are all in ~/.something
> > files or folders and that way would still be unique per distro.
> 
>   Agreed.
> 
> 
> 

Leaving /home within the distro's root file system space and linking to
a common folder/partition (that I happen to mount as /data and is auto
mounted in each /etc/fstab) is the way I always do it. Works well here &
this machine alone has 5 different distros on it with 5 different user
names.

What I do to overcome the UID problem is that, under each distro
installed, I create a Group called 'share' and manually give it an id of
1500. That tends to be away from anything created automatically. I then
place all the users who I want to access the shared data in that group.
In fact, I make it their default group. I then make sure the shared
partition's folders are all marked as writeable by 'group'. You can even
go so far as making default 'umask' for each user as 664 rather than
644.

This way everything that gets written to the shared /data folders has a
group name of 'share', group id of '1500' and is writeable by any member
of the group. Doesn't matter what the uid of the user is or which distro
they come from.

Paul.