Share /home Directory

aeruzcar · 09-01-2003, 10:04 PM

Hello
I'm running 2 distributions, Gentoo and SuSE, I installed SuSE first and created a partition for /home, now I would like to use that same partition for home with gentoo, I can create a new user, but my question is, if I have a user, for example patrick, with SuSE, I have the /home/patrick directory, now, can I create a patrick user with Gentoo and use the same /home/patrick directory with reading and writing atributions??
Thanks

contrasutra · 09-01-2003, 10:10 PM

Yes, you should be able to do it. But I wouldnt. The only thing i'd share would be swap.

Basically, you are taking some risks in screwing up permissions and settings.

Most of your user settings are stored in your HOME directory. So if you change a settings in Gentoo (or vice versa) it could screw up your setup.

slapNUT · 09-01-2003, 10:15 PM

I share the /home directory with several distributions with no major problems. The main concern is that different distros will give users different default gid/uid settings. Just make sure in /etc/passwd on both distributions that patrick has the same uid/gid and everything should work fine.

fancypiper · 09-01-2003, 10:17 PM

Yes, just make sure the UID (user id) and name is the same for both. I like my main user to have a uid of 500, because that is what it was when I first installed.

If it happens to be different and doesn't work, give this command:

chown -R 500.500 /home/<user>

or

chown -R <user>.<user> /home/<user>

That will reset the owner.group to the new install.

Proud · 09-02-2003, 01:26 PM

To avoid messing up your personal configurations, use the same version of programs for the different installs.

slapNUT · 09-02-2003, 07:50 PM

What I always do is to install the distro not using my /home partition. Then I will boot the new distro and mount my /home on /mnt/tmp. Now I can change my home directory to /mnt/tmp and login. If everything works OK then I edit /etc/fstab to automatically mount my /home partition. You can remove /home off the new distro to give you more space on the / partition.