Sharing /home partition between distros
 

hi everyone, i have FC6 on my system and I'm considering installing Gentoo as well.

If you have 2 or more linux distros installed could they all use a common /home partition without them interfering with each other.

thanks

yes no problem just remember not to format /home during instillation

In some cases, the hidden configuration files in a users home directory will conflict if you share the same username between distros. Gnome, KDE, etc may have this problem.

What I prefer, is to create a separate /data partition in ext3 format to hold my documents. I then have a single root partition for each distro, and a common swap. This way, you can share your documents between distros and the configurations stay unique to each distro.

I have a page Here with more information about multibooting distros. I also setup an independent GRUB boot loader, and then install each distros boot loader into its root partition (this is an option during install). This means that upgrades to any one distro do not affect any other distros.

I hope this helps
--Ian

My thoughts are,...YOU'RE right, and...two Hard Drives is best for Linux Distros when they are using different <FS> managers. Gentoo has Portage, Emerge, and Network Updating. Fedora has more conventional approaches to Distro excellence. The "/home" partition and the "Linux swap" partitions are shared when set up correctly without loss of speed or conflict in access. My preference for the separate Hard Drives is,...Boot Loading and File System behavior with individual characteristics. Now 2007, most Linux Users have larger Hard Drives for multi-booting. Also; smaller Hard Drives are less expensive, and can be set up to function together. IDE; SATA, and PATA have better Motherboards and their respective interfaces. RAID is also growing in usage and productivity. BIOS is larger in size.

"multibooting distros" link changed?
 

Ian,

Do you have an updated link for your "multibooting distros" document? The link below is dead, and the document looks helpful.

Thank you.
Greg Conquest

I do as Ian does
Except...
My shared data partition is formatted ntfs because I use Windows also and 'tis much better to access ntfs from Linux than to access ext3 with Windows. And the NTFS file system is more robust providing it was created with Windows.
Sharing a /home partition works also between Linux installations, but you need to be root to access another user's /home directory, as it is better to just create a different user for each distro. Using the same user from one KDE desktop to another KDE desktop in another distro can still cause major hair loss.
You can install ntfs-3g in all the Linux installations and everybody can read/write to the ntfs partition.

Here is Saikee's "multi-booting the old fashioned way" tut.

Don't use ntfs for a Linux home partition. The ownership/properties/acls won't work.
If you use a different home directory inside a shared /home partition, then there won't be a problem. You will want to use the same UID if you want to share files between the home files. You might also want to make the Documents and Downloads directories of the 2nd, 3rd, etc. distro be symbolic links to the corresponding directory on the first distro you install.
A users home directory is listed in /etc/passwd, so each distro could use the same username but refer to different home directories, such as username-suse, username-fc9, username-ubuntu, etc.

You will want to update grub only using the first distro. Otherwise you could end up with a dueling distro's situation.

Updated Link: http://www.iball.id.au/node/26

It probably is a bit out-dated now, but the principals remain the same. I no longer dual-boot, as I prefer to use VMWare to try out different distros, Windows, etc.

--Ian

I am not able to complete root command for grub installation. I get error 21.
My grub partition is extended dev/sda5. what address should i give.

Could someone clarify this. Is an NTFS partition created with GParted less robust?

If so is there any reason for this?

Thanks

+1 for that.

My solution, similar to ideas already posted, is to have /home/c on the root partition (for everything that is distro-specific) and to mount a file system containing all personal non-distro-specific files at /home/c/d. Many of the /home/c/.* files-and-directories are not actually distro-specific. These I put on /home/c/d and create symbolic links to them from /home/c, for example .keepass, .mozilla and .openoffice.org.

There is a /home/c/bin directory for personal distro-specific executables and a /home/c/d/bin for personal non-distro-specific executables.

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