[ubuntu-za] CREATING PARTITIONS?

[Russell Cloran]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 5:06 PM, vincent <bullet at ballmail.co.za> wrote:
> The plan was to create just one /Home partition,sda5, one /etc,sda6,
> one /var,sda7, Swap,sda4 & so on, which would then be accessable by both 8.04
> & 9.04 in their own individual partitions, eg. sda8 & sda9.
>
> Is this feasible? - If this was how you read my question, great, but I thought
> it needed clarity.

I wouldn't recommend trying to share /etc and /var between two
different operating system versions.

/var definitely won't work -- that's where apt keeps information about
installed packages. Perhaps you can get away with splitting it out
some more, but disk space is so cheap and /var on a newly installed
Debian machine is around 60MB that it's not going to be worth the
pain.

I'd say the same for /etc -- Lee's comment about config files that
happen to live in /home applies to /etc, and so you'll get a lot more
pain than what you're saving.

swap is the only thing I'd bother trying to share between the
partitions, and I'd keep a /data or something like that for files
which get shared between installations (ie, it'll become your /home
for non-dotfiles).

Russell