hi,
i have a home partition that is (goinf) to be shared among multiple distros (mdk, slk). while in mdk, i create user rgiggs. now, when i get into slk, i want to create a user with the same name and owns /home/rgiggs. basically, i want to use "rgiggs" with both distros. how can i do it?
thanks.

It should do it easily. When you do adduser, it may ask when it comes to making /home/rgiggs if this is correct since it already exists. Just say yes. Be warned however that what you are going to do is a bad idea. mdk uses special icons that are not available in slack. So there is going to be conflicts.

Icons? What? Conflicts from using different icons... ?

Ring, it's a just a tad more complicated than that, and the icons have nothing to do with it.

rgiggs -- first of all, realize that when creating a user that's going to be sharing the same home, settings and priveleges, it is not the username that is important -- it's the user ID #.

Slack defaults to user 1000 + for UID numbers. Some distros use 500+.
My first user created in slack is user #1000.

Go ahead and create the user in the newer distro. Then look at /etc/passwd in the existing distro and identify your user's name and ID #. Example as follows.

mike is my user name, and 1000 is the user ID number -- the first user I created in Slack.

Once you create your user in the second distro, open up /etc/passwd and change the ID number to whatever it was in the pre-existing distro. The UID number has to match between distros to actually have the same owner and be usable between the two.

If you're still getting trouble sharing the same home, it may take a
chown -R username
to get it all working.
But once you've got the user id changed to the same in both distros, it should be all gravy.

--Shade

You could also just symlink the relevant files from one distro ('/etc/passwd' etc) to the other distro's files, then, when you add a user later on one distro, you can use that account on the other distro too.

Make sure you mount the other partition as /home on both distros.

There could be icon problems. If you use a GUI and the path and icon are different on the distros it won't show up on the other one. For example, they're stored for KDE in a session file in /home/username/.kde

Some distros look for different files in different paths which could create a conflict in a ~/.config_file. I personally don't know how similar Mandrake and Suse do this.

I would create a user in one distro and use its /etc/password /etc/shadow as an example to configure those respective users in the second distro.

hi,
so i used "adduser," entered same name, entered usedid that is recognized by mdk, don't change the path /home/rgiggs, chown /home/rgiggs.
so far, everything seems to work ok.
thanks.

Not a very good idea to do.. I tried that once and everything got screwed up.. Had to delete .kde every time i switched distros.. Example i restarted in gentoo delete .kde redo all settings reboot to debian same thing.. But if its working i guess it cant hurt..

hi,
i also considered possible conflicts, but i thought they should be few because mdk10 and slk10 are released close to each other. the packages shouldn't change that much. so far, it's been smooth.

Just because they aren't release too far apart doesn't mean they couldn't have completely different structures. I think you'd spend more time trying to iron it out than it's worth. Why not just have a partition to store things like your documents, and then have the user settings be independant?

hi,
i think it's a good idea, too. and that's what i'll do if i see any conflicts. but the reason i installed slack is because i really want to use it. and the reason i have mandrake at all is because i couldn't get slack to work properly when i switched from winxp. so now, since it's working like a charm, i won't be using mandrake much (if at all), so there should be no problems.
yay. thanks.