Hello all,

I am trying very hard to get up and running with a lovely new 200Gb hard drive on which it is my dream to be able to install several different linux distros.

I have created a separate /home partition with the intention of deing able to use that across all distros.

So far I have installed Fedora and Mandrake.

I have created a user called "mark" in both. When I log in as "mark" in Mandrake - no problem. When I log in as "mark" in Fedora I get a garbled error message and a complete system hang. On investigating a little further by logging in as root on Fedora I found that the files in the home/mark folder all had owner and group permissions of 501 whereas normally in Fedora they would be have "mark" as owner and group. Furthermore my "mark" user in Fedora had a UID of 500.

No problem - I thought - I'll just delete the user "mark" with UID of 500 and create another with the name "mark" but UID of 501 to match the Mandrake settings.

No Joy. Mandrake wanted me to re-configure all my setiings (no problem - it's a new set-up) but Fedora still crashes on log-in.

Other users created in Fedora work just fine.

Is there any way round this?
Is it possible to be able to share the /home directory accross distros - even to the point of having common users - or not?.....

Thanks for your help


Mark

yes there is, I do it with LFS and Slackware............you have to use different names tho.......
do the names like this...........
markm=mandrake
markf=fedora
..........etc
marks=Slackware......

you can use the same /home directory but each distro user needs a different directory.

Ahh!

This was really my question. In other words can I - as user "mark" - access the same files irrespective of which distro I have used to log in, and user "fred" would be able to access fred's files (but not mark's) from whichever distro?

Is this really not possible?

Thanks for your help...

Mark

I don't think that you understood the earlier response. Your home directory would be different logging on to one or the other distro. What you are sharing is the /home partition. If you manually selected the UID for mark to be the same as the UID for fred in the other distro, Then fred and mark would be able to read each others files without restrictions.

The problem you are having is due to the second distro changing files in ~/.kde/ for example. But something you could do is have your own directories linked to the other home page.

For example, /home/fred/Documents/ => /home/mark/Documents/
/home/fred/Downloads/ => /home/mark/Downloads/

If you keep your work in directories in your home directory, working in one distro should be a lot like working in another.

it can be done, i did it with ubuntu and fedora, the user IDs must be the same aswell as the name.