/home/ on fat32 fs - a good idea?
 

i am running a dual boot computer with mdk10.0/w2k and am experimenting with making a fat32 partition my home directory. this way i could use all my user files from both operating systems. this works my making a symbolic link /home/ -> /mnt/fat32drv. could this cause any troubles? opinions, please?

try it and see..............

I'd just mount the FAT partition from fstab, but that shoudl work.

Also keep in mind you may get a poerformance hit with FAT32 and fragmentation problems inherent to all things winblows.

Other than that, FAT32 is a somewhat legitimate file system so there should be no problem. I've had similar success using fedora

It will cause permission and security problems. You have to use sh or perl to run your scripts. You may have problems with programs locking files because FAT32 does not have that feature that Linux filesystems have

Assuming that the data in /home is important to you, I would recommend using a Linux file system rather than fat32. As Electro mentions and as explained in this article, Linux file permissions aren't supported by fat32, and that to me would be a deal killer.

You could set up a small fat32 partition, and just copy files into it as needed, but I would not put my entire /home directory on that file system. Strictly my 2 cents, others may have different views. -- J.W.