Ok, I've been playing around with Mandrake for a while, and now I'd like to take a stab at LFS, mostly for the learning experience.

I've got Windows on the first hard disk (40GB) and I've got a second hard disk (120GB) with Mandrake 10. What I'd like to do is set up the second drive so that I have both Mandrake and LFS on the same drive, but in different partitions. Of course, when I installed Mandrake, it took the whole disk -- mostly with a 110 GB /home partition.

So here's what I was thinking. I'd like to shrink the /home partition to make room for LFS and possibly other distributions someday. My question has to do with sharing partitions between distrobutions. I know I can share the swap partition, but is it also possible to share the /home partition? Then I could just have a root partition for each distribution and have all my data shared between them.

Is this a good idea, or am I likely to run into problems (with configuration files, maybe?) Does anyone do this?

Also, I'm looking for some recommendations for partitioning tools. Diskdrake looks nice, but I can't figure out how to make it work since the /home partition is always "in use" when I'm running diskdrake.

Thanks!
Mike

Sharing your home partition between distributions is a good idea.

People who work in a NIS authentication environment often have a NFS mounted home directory that follows them around as they log onto different systems. Sharing the home directory on your disk between different bootup environments as you suggest would be similar to this.

If I recall correctly, root doesn't keep any files in /home - so if you log in as root, you should be able to unmount /home

And you'll have to make sure your user names match user ID's - I think that's done in the /etc/shadow file..?

I share my /home between my Slackware and LFS distros. It saves a lot of duplication.

You just have to be a little wary of running different versions of the same program on different distros as they may treat the same ~/.blah file differently, resulting in errors. Shouldn't happen but could.

Thanks, guys, but I've been looking around some more and found conflicting evidence...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...home+partition
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...home+partition

So I was thinking maybe the best thing to do is have a partition for each distro, including the root, /usr, and so on, including a small space for /home. Then have a separate swap partition, and a fairly large partition (call it /data) that can be mounted independentaly of the distro I'm running - my windows drive is a little like this already, except that it's read only.

Any problems this this approach, or am I making this too complicated?

Thanks,
Mike

That's more-or-less what I do, only more organised