hello.

i'm setting up a dual boot system with winxp and mandrake9.2 and have gotten this crazy idea of streamlining it a little by placing the /home directory onto a shared partition. since i'm the only user on it, security isn't really an issue. anyway, is this possible? is it recommended? will one of the os's be confused by it?

I wouldn't reccomend doing this because the only partition type you can shere effectively is vfat/fat32 and it does not support unix file permissions. When I have a dualboot sysmte I usually create a mountpoint called "/shared" that holds the shared data (shared between OSs) then in Linux you can create a symlink into your home directory:
ln -s /shared/harry /home/harry/files

So when you access the files link within your home directory you are acutally accessing the files in the "harry" directory on the shared partition.

not the answer i was hoping for. it just seems inefficient to have an extra partition. thanks very much for the advice though.

Thanks for this great idea, david_ross!

I used motub's detailed article to mount a shared partition with win98, but what she suggests is to do it inside your home dir.
http://home.planet.nl/~elst0093/motub/multboot.html

You mean you've created an extra partition, don't you?
Aren't there any security problems just as if it was mounted on /home/user1?
Or do you mean it's different because the partition is on its own, sort of quarantined!

I suppose having someting like windoz on your computer is always a bit of a threat anyway, isn't it?

I'm not sure where you are seeing an extra partition. On some systems having extra partitions can actually increase performance as it can let you place the data you access the most on the fasted parts of your drive.

It's just that in my setup I want to use that partition and have it mounted for several users so having it mounted directly in my home directory isn't as useful - it is easier just to symlink it to my home directory.

The vfat partition is seperate, yes.
It is very difficult to guage what you would anticipate in the way of security problems. All filesystems that are not encrypted can be accessed by anyone with physical access to a computer in one way or another. The main security issue is that each fat partition can only be mounted with a set of permissions that exist on all files. So if two people use the same partition to store files then they also have access to each others documents.

Having Windows on your PC isn't that much of a security risk, running it on the other hand would leave you fat fartition open to any viri that your computer is not protected against.