installation doubt

[Liam Proven]

On 18 November 2011 12:51, Buggs Bunny <valambanam at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> When I am multi-booting a computer between different distros, I share
>> a home filesystem but use different user accounts. So, for instance,
>> on my own laptop, I have Ubuntu 11.10 with user "lproven" and Linux
>> Mint Debian Edition with user "liam". This is perfectly safe.
>
> So suppose if you have logged in with "liam" (booting LInux Mint Debian
> Edition), you get the desktop of "liam".

That's right, yes.

> Now from this desktop can you see
> the items of "lproven" (the user of Ubuntu 11.10)

Yes. But I deliberately leave the security settings fairly low - e.g.
no encrypted home directories. And since in both cases they are the
*only* user, they probably have the same user *number* - 1000:1000.

> ...doubt...If both the
> users would have been named as "universe" (say, for example) we must/could
> (?) have been having two different home directories....

The name of the home directory is just /home/$username$ so it is
essential to give different names to the user accounts on the
different installations.

Same name = same home dir = potential problems if using different
versions of the same desktop environment.

Same version of the same desktop - e.g. 2 side-by-side installs of
Ubuntu 11.10 = no problem! But why would you want to do that? :¬)

> since both the users
> belong to different distro though they share the common '/home'....however,
> I am not going to do this, why to increase the complications...but since I
> am noob, out of curiosity, just have confusions....

That is fair enough. Play it safe.

>> My work laptop has Mint 9, Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10 and I think something
>> else as well. All use different usernames.
>
> To have the different usernames causes no problem, no complications, that is
> the best policy, I guess...
>
>>
>> On the other hand, you can safely share a single home directory
>> between different installs of the same (or similar) distros. My
>> desktop has 2 installs of Ubuntu 11.10 - my original one, which failed
>> the day after I upgraded, and a new, troubleshooting install in a
>> different partition. Both share /home/lproven with no problems. The
>> clean install now runs GNOME Shell and the original install Unity -
>> these do not clash at all.
>
> In this case it is necessary that both the user names are same which share
> the same home directory, since otherwise, it is not a possibility...(?)...

Using the same name is fine if it is the same version of the same
distro. Normally, though, there is no point in doing this. I was
troubleshooting a problem in this case. I will get rid of the 2nd, new
install at some point - I don't need it any more.

>> If you (e.g.) run KDE on one OS and GNOME on the other, say, it works
>> fine - they don't trample on one another's settings. You sometimes get
>> the odd stray desktop icon from one OS that does nothing on the other,
>> but mostly, it's fine.
>
> But in this case too, it is (always?) better to have the user names
> different....and if same, still they would have two home directories under
> the same shared '/home' partition or would have a single directory..?

If the name is the same, the home dir is the same. N.B. this is the
*short* name - e.g. "lproven" - not the full long name - e.g. "Liam
Proven".

To keep them separate, you can add a number on the end. So on one of
my boxes, Mint 9 uses a user called "mint" and Mint 11 uses a user
called "mint11".

>> But for this reason, now, I use separate user accounts. That causes no
>> problems at all.
>
> Ah, that without any complications...!

Yes. :¬)

> Thanks.

You're welcome.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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