Linux From ScratchThis Forum is for the discussion of LFS.
LFS is a project that provides you with the steps necessary to build your own custom Linux system.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
Ok, I've been playing around with Mandrake for a while, and now I'd like to take a stab at LFS, mostly for the learning experience.
I've got Windows on the first hard disk (40GB) and I've got a second hard disk (120GB) with Mandrake 10. What I'd like to do is set up the second drive so that I have both Mandrake and LFS on the same drive, but in different partitions. Of course, when I installed Mandrake, it took the whole disk -- mostly with a 110 GB /home partition.
So here's what I was thinking. I'd like to shrink the /home partition to make room for LFS and possibly other distributions someday. My question has to do with sharing partitions between distrobutions. I know I can share the swap partition, but is it also possible to share the /home partition? Then I could just have a root partition for each distribution and have all my data shared between them.
Is this a good idea, or am I likely to run into problems (with configuration files, maybe?) Does anyone do this?
Also, I'm looking for some recommendations for partitioning tools. Diskdrake looks nice, but I can't figure out how to make it work since the /home partition is always "in use" when I'm running diskdrake.
Sharing your home partition between distributions is a good idea.
People who work in a NIS authentication environment often have a NFS mounted home directory that follows them around as they log onto different systems. Sharing the home directory on your disk between different bootup environments as you suggest would be similar to this.
You just have to be a little wary of running different versions of the same program on different distros as they may treat the same ~/.blah file differently, resulting in errors. Shouldn't happen but could.
So I was thinking maybe the best thing to do is have a partition for each distro, including the root, /usr, and so on, including a small space for /home. Then have a separate swap partition, and a fairly large partition (call it /data) that can be mounted independentaly of the distro I'm running - my windows drive is a little like this already, except that it's read only.
Any problems this this approach, or am I making this too complicated?
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.