Users & passwords in shared /home partition

mikieboy · 02-24-2005, 07:10 PM

I'm thinking of putting a second distro onto my hardrive so that I can play about without knobbling my Slack 10 setup. I have a separate /home partition which I could share between the two distros. My question is, would I have to use the same user names and passwords in both distros for this to work?

ToniT · 02-24-2005, 07:26 PM

You can chose any passwords freely. Using same usernames is not strictly necessary, but makes a lot of sense. Same userIDs is a good thing, or else the permissions and ownerships of the files doesn't match between the systems.

Easy way to archieve this is to copy /etc/passwd and /etc/group (or critical lines from there) to your new system. To get passwords too, copy also /etc/shadow.