shared partitions among distros?
 

hi,
i plan to install 2 or 3 distros.
i have a few questions:

1) which partitions can be safely shared among the distros? (i think swap is one.)
for example, /home usually stores my personal stuff, right? so can all distros use 1 /home partition instead of having their own?

2) there's /root, but / is also called "root." what's the difference?

3) what's a kernel image?

thanks.

Really, the only safe one IMO would be the /swap partition.

In MDK and Red Hat/Fedora, you only truly need 3 partitions: /, /boot, and swap. The rest are optional. If you tried to share the / and /boot partitions they'd just get formatted during the second install you did, destroying your first install. This goes for the rest (/root, /var, etc). Swap doesn't matter because no two distros are accessing at once and no info is being saved there.

just use one partition for each distribution and share 1 swap among them.

/ is the root directory
/root is the root user's home directory. it doesn't have to be. you can move it.

Speaking of which. I want to move my /home directory and put it onto another partition, which in turn will be mounted to /home.

How can I best do this? I've got like 10mb free on my slackware partition & I desperately need to move my /home directory onto another partition.

I desperately need the space to download more episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. :D

/dev/hda3 ---> slackware (everything incl swap)
/dev/hda4 ---> fresh new 4gb of space for Spongebob Squarepants

mount the empty partition somewhere and copy everything in home to it, then mount it at home. add an entry in fstab for your new /home partition. delete the old home stuff when
you are confident you've copied everything correctly.

Ahh! True! Just how I thought you'd do it. I'm getting the hang of this. Although I tried copying /home yesturday & got all these crazy file-system errors.

I did it today and it was sweet. This is great! I now have plenty of room for Spongbob Squarepants!

Oh yeah & thanks! ;)

if you don't get the permissions right in the copying, some users may have trouble getting their files. and you really can't get to the home directory with the other partition mounted at home. and spongebob is probably scared of dimmu borgir and cradle of filth.

He's probably the only one scared of dani these days. I found a flag that made cp preserve the file permissions etc, which seemed to remedy that. Cheers.