What I am saying is you are trying to get something to work when it is sitting in the exact same partition as something else. Now all of a sudden it wont work for you so you want to put it in another partition. That my dear boy is a compatibility issue. I never said anything about /usr or 32-64 bit in my previous post. I just pointed out that because you now have to have vector in its own partition your assumption that it could work in the same partition as 5 other OSs was incorrect.

If you want to take my so called BS to the higher authorities go ahead make my day.

I thought about that a while and it may be that the symlinks are not the issue. Lets say you have mint installed to sda1 and then moved its /usr directory to /mint/usr on dev sda2 and created the symlink. The problem might be that the symlink will be broken unless you have mounted sda2, so sda2 has to be mounted in the boot-process before any file in /usr will be accessed. Do you have the partition with the /mint/usr directory in your fstab?

A proposal was made to move dirs to another partition and create symlinks to them and your incorrect response was "64bit distros will not coexist with 32bit distros" and "compatibility problems between distros", "won't write a book for you". This is the definition of BS.

Yes, it has been there since installation.

Duplicating the entire partition and then moving /usr to /mint8/usr and symlinking from the first partition to the second produces the same failure.

But wait, it works fine if usr stays in the same partition, renamed to _usr and symlinked.

Aha, that's probably a problem, the new partition got a different uid and now does not appear in fstab any more.

Being rude won't get you anywhere.

This is what you said
Now the only "partition mentioned here is one containing symbolic links, nothing about moving an entire OS(vector) to its own partition. Please clarify your current thinking processes so we know what you are actually trying to do. Are you trying to have everything in 1 partition? or are you trying to have everything except for Vector in one partition but Vector gets its own partition? of course this is notwithstanding your desire to have 1 separate partition that contains only symobolic links.

My responses to what you said were
So from the beginning, I never said it was impossible, I did say it would be alot of work. I never said 32 bit and 64 bit wouldn't work together and I gave an example of Debian bring in multiarch support in testing now, I asked you how do you propose to do it.
You asked a question I gave an answer which you ignored and then told me it wasn't specific enough. I'll apologise now for not being a computer brainiac and there is no way I will write a book on something I think is rather extreme, if you want to do it go ahead, learn from the experience but the rest of us volunteer our time so please don't expect us to do all your theory work for you when greater minds than ours are only just implementing in a testing distribution some of the things you are trying to do on your own. As for compatibility problems of course there will be and it is up to you to work through them, we are not the people doing this, we can offer advice (which you seem to be ignoring anyway) but we are not conducting the experiment first hand so you are the one that is going to have to do the hard yards. It is obvious that from your proposition you are now changing it so you can have Vectio in its own partition, that should say to you there are compatibility issues somewhere, even if you do symlink from one partition (i.e Vector on its own) to another it is not what you proposed to do. What you proposed was each distro in the one partition and a partition just for symlinks.

So please clarify what you want to do exactly how you want to do it.

Face the truth. You did not understand the proposal, and even when it was explained in detail, you still continued the nonsense about "compatibility", as recently as yesterday. I rest my case.

I posted your proposal verbatum, if it was not understood it is because it wasn't accurately described. You sir are a troll who is just racking up a post count by answering your own posts with one liners and arguing with people who have attempted to help you.

Good luck with your endevour, I look forward to proof (YouTube clip or a complete book) on how to do it. Ta ta.

Well actually I have understood exactly what Ulysses is trying to do and, although I don't see a need for doing something like that, I still think it is doable. He explained more understandable in post #9 and extended his proposal in post #20. When I have some more time I think I will try it myself just for the learning experience.

This is a personal attack, name calling and a blatant violation of LQ rules. You are being reported.

Toby you have seen the claims of "incompatibility" that he has been posting. You have pointed out his mistake. I urge you to notice that this time he is even lying blatantly to our face about what was posted: notice this quote of his.

The proposal that "all 6 distros' files be moved" is dishonestely misreported as "nothing about moving an entire OS".

The mention of "one big partition" and a "separate tiny partition" are dishonestly misreported as "the only partition mentioned here is one containing symbolic links".

Lying, lying, lying and rhetoric. Please put this right as you see fit.

hmmmmm, you are an interesting personality. I look forward to being reported and discussing this with the moderation team. in the meantime have you succeeded in your endeavour?