In my home there are at least 5 computers: one "central" PC but old, my PC (old too), a thin client (diskless) and tow laptops, one with wireless support and one without. We have mostly old computers which should work better if the work is distributed in the network behind the wired-wireless router (besides, we'll surely buy a new computer within a few months), and Linux works great for my family needs (I guess a 256MB and pIII 800Mhz is enough for reading news, emailing, doing office stuff, etc, all with lightweight apps until we have a better 2GB 3 Ghz PC). So I'd like to have an easy to use and GUI fast install distro with / and /home directories in a great computer that I hope we'll have so I can share among the PCs and thus, login as any user in any PC through KDM and have a nice experience XD. I wonder if I can have /usr in my computer with Gentoo (NFS) and share the programs to all the computers, maybe not all of them with the same distro. As fas as I know, distros need to mount it commonly (/usr) and do some tasks during installation, in that case I will mount the shared /usr partition to /usr/local or create some other appropiate name.

I think you are asking 2 Q's here: the title & then for a distro recommendation.

The short A's: "SimplyMEPIS" & "You don't need to"


In general, sharing /usr works only if the distros on each machine are the same. I know it's supposed to be sharable, but on the assumed basis that everything in it is compatible across the boxen sharing it -- i.e. running the same distro.

You mention your (very valid) concerns w/ RAM & CPU MHz, not the size of the HD's. Why do you want to share /usr, if not to save space? Surely it will load faster from a local drive than across a network.

If you were sure that a given item on the Gentoo box were the same, exactly the same, as what's needed by another distro, then you could probably link to it. I suspect it would be easier to just do an independent install of the other distro, than to figure the compatibilities.


I still like SimplyMEPIS. Although I haven't given ver. 6 a through test drive, I like what I've seen so far. I haven't looked at it yet, but for "converts" I would like to evaluate Freespire as a possibility. I looked at Linspire about a year ago, & had too many practical & philosophical problems w/ it to be able to recommend it in good conscience. With the release of Freespire, that may have changed, I need to check.

FWIW, SimplyMEPIS is still a separate distro -- it only uses the Ubuntu repositories, nothing else. I favor it for ease of install & use, as well as the nice layout of KDE. Of course it's taught me so much about the possibilities of KDE, that I could probably be very happy w/ Etch or the next Debian testing.

Well, I think I said something about disk space, but anyway my computers are old and need to optimize it, specially in a PC which hasn't any hard drive at all. I will install only one distribution for all the home network, so I need it to be stable, and not necessarily with the bleedy edge software: I'm back to Debian.

For a little while it's still: "Sarge is for servers." When Etch goes stable, it won't have the same ring to it.

And to come back to the original question: if the
executables in varied distros are compiled against
different glibc I'd dare say it can't be done. If
all the machines ran the same version of the same
distro (and enough grunt on the server and fast
networking for the rest) by all means, you can pretty
much share everything around via NFS.



Cheers,
Tink

Besides, if the issue is space on a given box, not the server, then you could have as many different /usr dirs as you need (on the server w/ distinguishing names) & mount them to their respective machines over the LAN.

I think is just too extreme to do that. Anyway, the client boxes are not a problem as I realize that any distro with X support will be completely fine doing X -query IP (KDM), in the server I'll have gentoo since it will have decent processing capabilities (for fast compiling, at install time I'll use binpkgs and then port the system to customized ebuilds) and enough disk space. I guess I will just install archlinux (or dsl) minimal+X in the boxes and use KDM (XDMCP protocol, maybe GDM) to share programs, users and files. For the diskless, I'll boot completely from the server.