Problems when sharing /home?
 

Hey all!

WEEEEEHOOOOOO!!!! WINDOWS FREE!!!

After dual booting with Slack and occasionally XP for about a year now, I decided to kick windows of my laptop! I decided to give Debian a try as second distro, and it worked out well.

Question: is it possible to share the /home partition between both ditro's? Didn't dare to touch or even mention it to the Deb-installation afraid that I might lose all the configs there.

I read in another thread that the only problem someone had with sharing the config files in /home/user was the /home/user/.icewm settings.

Are there other problems to be expected?
I installed Debian on one partition, sharing swap with Slack on another partition. Slack has it's /home on a separate partition. Can I somehow change the Deb /home folder to Slack's /home partition?
Actually, now I'v come to think of it, is it possible to also point Deb's /usr/local to Slack's /usr/local?

Cheers, Leon.

Sure, but you may have problems if the distro's have different version of the same app like kde. I've found some difference in config/mail/etc.. Make a backup of your home including hidden folders/files before you do the dual share.

Thanx -X-
Hmm yes, different versions would matter... Anyway, on Slack I never bothered to install KDE (nor gnome). First thing I installed on Debian was Fluxbox ;-)

[edit] no that's a lie, Checkinstall was first ;-)

Alternatively you could mount your home directories in a different location. Maybe /slackhome for your slackware home directory from debian, and /debianhome for the converse. I guess you could share the home directory across distros, there are probably even examples of it somewhere. But I would be too worried about one distro changing the config settings for the other. (You should probably make sure your uid's and gid's match as well. )

I used to use the same /home partition and had no problem but I used a different username for each to avoid muddling configs.