Sharing a /home partition!!
 

If i were to share a /home partition among FC3 and SUSE, what type of file type should i select for the /home partiton.
Whats the best method to share one /home partition between FC and SUSE.assuming that i have already mounted the FC3 on /home during installation and the i am going to install SUSE.
? 1. Should i mount suse on that /home partition during the installation OR
? 2. Should i just leave the /home and just specify root partition (/) and then after installation do something to add the /home ( say its on /dev/hda2) on the /etc/fstab ?
I would appriciate if anyone could help on this matter....

Thank you,

I dunno, but I'd think sharing the whole home directory might get tricky, unless you are using different user id's on each distro. Home holds a lot of user specific settings in hidden files.

If you are using different ID's, just do as you thought...install SUSE and set the shared directories to mount on /home in your fstab.

I'd be interested to know if people actually use a proper shared "home" between distros with the same user ID's.

L

hehehe, i am having enaugh trouble using the same UID and trying to share the same home :)
So i'd think better use different id's cuz there is lot of conflict between the UID between the distributions.

But when editing fstab after installation do i just add a line in the SUSE fstab like this
but will there be a problem with "/ext3", normally dosn't SUSE renames its partiton it installs and its file system type is something else other than /ext3 by default ?

Thanx for your advice,
Regards,

By default SUSE uses the ReiserFS instead of ext3. Thats not to say you can't use ext3 if you prefer. Just change it during setup (in the partitioning section).

However, this does not affect what you put in the SUSE fstab - you just specify what
the fs type is that you are trying to mount.

/dev/hda2 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

EDIT: Not quite right before;-)

But if i have already used ext3 for /home when i first installed FC3 and the in the SUSE fstab i use ReiserFS, then will there be a conflict?

Cheers,
Regards,

The home directory for a user is determined by what is in a field of the /etc/passwd file. The /home partition is a storage location for these directories, and could be on a central server or a NAS storage device.

One thing that you could do is to have seperate home directories for a user for each distribution, but have the documents and downloads subdirectories be links to common subdirectories.

To have full rights to these folders you would need to make sure that the user IDs and group IDs are the same. You would only want to do this for the same person, because then all of the directories would be readable by the user with that UID and GID.

So, for example, consider a user name in SuSE called Azzath-SuSE and a user name in FC3 called Azzath-FC3
Then there would be /home/Azzath-SuSE, /home/Azzath-FC3, /home/Azzath-SuSE/documents, /home/Azzath-SuSE/documents folders plus links
/home/Azzath-FC3/documents -> /home/Azzath-SuSE/documents
/home/Azzath-FC3/downloads -> /home/Azzath-SuSE/downloads

You also might want to change the numbers that users and groups start at. I think that FC has users start at 500 while SuSE starts from 1000, but this can be changed in the system configuration so that groups and users IDs occupy the same range of numbers.

An alternative is to have the UID of the two home folders unique, and to make both users members of the same group (GID) so that they have r/w access to a common documents folder.
For this you might have a documents folder located at /home/documents instead.

Thank you guys for all your lovely help....
For now i think i will use different home partitons for individual distributions.

Thanking again,
Kind regards,