I'm a long-time Mandriva user, currently running 2011. I'm aware that Mandriva 2011 uses rpm5, which is incompatible with Mageia 2, but does the same issue exist with Mageia 3?

Also, if I need to dual-boot with a shared Home directory, what should I be aware of? Any tricks anyone wants to share?

I have Mageia 3 and rpm --version reports 4.11.0.1.

As for booting with a shared home directory, I would be reluctant to do it because of possible conflicts in the dot-config files.

Here's a good thread from Ask Ubuntu on this topic: http://askubuntu.com/questions/55224...-distributions

On the Mageia forums, they're recommending blowing away Mandriva to switch. That is developing to be the consensus. I'd want to keep the Home sector, the tmp directory and the files of Firefox and Opera links, but as long as that's doable I'm fine.

Up untill about a year ago, I was switching between mandy and magie with the one /home/glenn user dir.

I remember there was a time I did a "cleaner" install and removed the . files from my home folder.

I had probably broken it before then.

Go for it, just don't format $USER (/home/yourusername)

edit, I keep a partition just for /home/glenn.

I too would not use the same home directory. (I've gotten burnt doing it) What I would do is before installing Mageia log directly into root. cd to you home directory
and rename each of the user account to a new name something like _org or .bak. Now when you load Mageia and create you new home directory's you can move any
important data back over to the new accounts. I would then import any email or bookmarks into your new software, This way you can get a real clean install. I've had to do this when trying different distributions. I've seen different KDE4 configuration.