How to share /home with two or more distros?
 

I have two hard drives (hda + hdb) and I'm installing two linux distros (Xandros and Suse 9.1, also thinking of Cobind as well). However, is it possible to have /home only on the hdb hard drive, while having both distros using hda hard drive. In other words, is it possible to share one home directory between two or more Linux distros?

Thanks......wilshaw

If your /home is on a different partition, say /dev/hda10, you can add that entry in /etc/fstab of your new distro.
You would need to maintain the uid and gid of the users to match those of the original distro.
Some distros may have different starting UIDs. e.g. RedHat/Fedora start with 500, Slackware starts with 1000. You can modify these parameters in /etc/login.defs.

I am sure you must be aware that you can share the swap space too.

Thanks for your quick response ppuru! I will try out your suggestion.

wilshaw

just a note ... you may need to change reiserfs to something more appropriate depending on your setup ... perhaps ext3.

If you are using the same X environment across all distros, you may notice some abberations --- icons of other distros being visible on your original distro and vice versa.