Howdy all,

Just wanted to know, is it adviseable to share /home and /boot partitions amongst distros?

You can certainly share home directories with different linux distributions. Heck, you can even use the same home directory in Solaris and AIX as you do in Linux without and problems (I've been in environments where this was the case because regardless of which OS or machine you were on your home directory was NFS mounted).

The /boot directory should be ok as well so long as your bootloader is setup ok... you could even share the same kernel if you wanted, and just change the root= line to determine which system to mount.

It's usually advised. However, while I do have several kernels in /boot, I don't like to share my true $HOME - don't like knome stuff gunking it up, for instance, and it's possible things could get confused regarding versions and other details that are different between systems and setups and versions. I usually mount it as a subdirectory of the 'home' in whatever other distro or setup I'm messing around with. Just copy a few essential configs upward and then, when I decide I'm tired of the other thing, I can easily wipe it and my original home is fine. But that's just me being overcautious and particular, probably. I don't think you'd generally have any problems sharing a $HOME.

So, to your answer question, just what jtshaw said - just thought I'd add some things to consider.

But if you seriously intend to dual-boot a couple of distros, yeah, I guess you'd want to share them. If you're just trying out another distro that you'll wipe, maybe you wouldn't.

Can I share /home with fedora 7/8-test and RHEL 5?
Are there any security issues?
Need to access my mail account,etc from both sides(F 7/8-test and RHEL5).