NFS guide:
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/

I am setting up a home/small office server using a c-class network with subnet using NFS:
192.168.1.* / 255.255.255.0;
exporting '/home' to 2 client laptops (/etc/exports) connected via LAN.

I am looking to use the desktop server with slackware13.0 [with kde3 from 12.2] used as a desktop workstation on occassions...

and two different laptops, one of them using slackware13.0 [with kde3 from 12.2];
and the second, using slackware13.1 [with kde4].

Both laptops mounting 'my.server.com:/home'

However I am concerned about compatibility of using kontact/kde3 and kontact/kde4 and other interoperable problems with kde3 and kde4 with server and clients using '~/.kde'.

Is this possible or am I about to step into a minefield of issues? - I will of course update this post but any advice would be welcome.

I don't use KDE... but off hand, you could move .kde in the user's directory to .kde3 and .kde4. Then the xinitrc.kde on each system would have to check for .kde, see if it's a sym link, move it if it's not, then delete/create a sym link to the correct .kde folder for that system... That should be enough to keep it correct. However, this causes problems if the same user logs on from two different machines running two different kdes... I have no solutions for you there, other than preventing the same user to log in from two different locations... some how... don't know how...


You may also be able to override what settings directory kde uses when it's launched. Again, you would set that per system in the global xinitrc.kde file.

It may not be only KDE that has version compatibility issues with configuration files and directories in ~/

For this reason a more satisfactory arrangement is to have /home/<username> directories on the local file system and make NFS-mounted shared data under it.

Assuming you have more than one user then one way of achieving this would be to have all the shareable data on the NFS server in /srv/nfs/shared with one directory below that for each user, that is /srv/nfs/shared/<user name 1> etc. On each NFS client computer, mount /srv/nfs/shared in the same location.

In each user's home directory, there could be a symlink to /srv/nfs/shared/<my user name> called "shared".

For programs that do not have version compatibility issues with configuration files and directories in ~/, it would be convenient to share the configuration so it would be the same on each computer. Using the Mozilla suite as an example, this could be implemented for each user by copying their existing ~/.mozilla hierarchy to /srv/nfs/shared/<username>/.mozilla and creating ~/.mozilla as a symlink to ~/shared/.mozilla

Possible gotchas are a) if the same user is working on more than one system and writing/saving configuration data to what is ordinarily a single user file or directory they may scramble the data and b) even apps that have compatible configuration data between versions may act as if you have just installed or upgraded on finding configuration data written by another version. Firefox and OpenOffice.org do that.