Sharing /home partition with Slackware and *BSD.
 

I'm going to install a BSD to my computer and dual boot with Slackware. I was wondering if I could use my /home partition with both Slackware and BSD.

Can this be done?

Which BSD? Open, Free, Net, PC, Desktop?

It all comes down to the question if you can find a filesystem which is usable for read and write from both systems. If your home partition in ext2, it should work (I've checked for FreeBSD).

But beware that if you use different versions of programs on BSD and Linux, you may have trouble with your configuration files, in the same way as if you shared between 2 Linux versions. If in system 1 you have KDE 3.2 and in system 2 you have KDE 3.4, KDE 3.4 might change a config file that puts KDE 3.2 into trouble. Of course this is not a KDE-specific issue, this can happen with every software.

That's why I wouldn't recommend sharing your home partition, but rather creating a mountpoint "/home/<your user>/shared" on each system and mounting the partition you want to share there. This way, all config files are local to each system, and you still share your user data.

I haven't decided on which BSD to install. I use ReiserFS as the filesystem for /home.

I agree with what uselpa said. Sharing /home across Linux and *BSD doesn't make sense. If you want a common data partition, use ext2 if you want write access from both places. *BSD doesn't support Reiserfs at all.

FreeBSD supports reiserfs read only. You can also use an ext3 fs on FreeBSD, though you need to mount it as ext2fs and won't be able to use the journeling functions

Yeah I had a bad feeling when I typed that in that I was making a mistake but I couldn't find any data on it. Sorry guys.

Oh, I didn't know that. Sorry...