How do you share the home directory and its data on multiple distributions which may or may not have similar software without damaging the application preferences. eg. If KDE_DIR is different for two distributions then wallpapers normally blank out. How do you avoid that?
Nikhil
On 3/12/06, Nikhil Marathe nsm.nikhil@gmail.com wrote:
How do you share the home directory and its data on multiple distributions which may or may not have similar software without damaging the application preferences...
You can set a separate partition for the /home directory which you mount at boot in each of the distros.
Siddhesh
On 3/12/06, Siddhesh Poyarekar siddhesh.poyarekar@gmail.com wrote:
You can set a separate partition for the /home directory which you mount at boot in each of the distros.
Siddhesh
Yes thats my current setup. I want to know how I can continue with this without messing up the .kde and .mozilla and other application preferences. Because I have SuSe and Arch. Suse KDE is in /opt/kde3, for arch it is /opt/kde. So it causes windecs, themes, kicker wallpapers, panel preferences problems.
Nikhil
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates ------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 22:14 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
How do you share the home directory and its data on multiple distributions which may or may not have similar software without damaging the application preferences. eg. If KDE_DIR is different for two distributions then wallpapers normally blank out. How do you avoid that?
Just curious, why do you want to create this headache for yourself.
Depending on the distros you will run into problems with the location of where the applications are installed as well as uid/gid issues.
IMO, it is best to settle on one distro and use it for your various needs. If you want to get a "feel" for the various distros then try virtualization.
Having said above, in the past I have shared /home with SuSE 9.3 and FC4 but don't do it anymore. Except for uid/gid mappings which I changed with "chown -R <uid>:<gid> $HOME", applications like KDE, Openoffice, Gnome worked fine.
Another option:
1. Have /home on the "root" partition for each distro itself, this will allow you have distro specific dot files for the various apps when you create the userid during the install process. 2. Have another partition (e.g. /dev/hda2) to hold your personal dirs/files that you would normally have under $HOME. 3. Mount /dev/hda2 on /data and create a sub-dir with your userid (that is common on all the distros you install). Give read/write permission to this uid/gid. 4. Create sub dirs (folders) under above dir for other sub dirs and files. 5. In your $HOME dir create links to the sub dirs and files you have created in step 4. Keep in mind, you will still need to change the mappings of uid:gid (as root or a boot script) in /data/<userid> for each specific distro that you boot.
HTH,
What you can try is mount a partition as /home and for the other you can create a directory inside that /home and mount that new directory as /home of the other distribution. Hope you get what I was trying to say. :D
Or best is to keep a separate partition for data, mount it as anything, and keep a symlink to it in /home.
-- Regards, Sanket Medhi.
I got an idea. Keep all my files in /data which is a shared partition then since my username is same on all distros, recursive chmod it. And then every distro has a small /home of about 100megs only for app preferences like KDE, firefox files. Everything else is in data.
On Tuesday 14 March 2006 09:00, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
I got an idea. Keep all my files in /data which is a shared partition then since my username is same on all distros, recursive chmod it. And then every distro has a small /home of about 100megs only for app preferences like KDE, firefox files. Everything else is in data.
Username doesn't make a difference. It's the UID and GID that matters. Different distros use different values. I have created a different user account just for this purpose. I use the same UID across multiple distros. I use ACL to manage 'extra' permissions so that only one other user can modify the files in this directory.
Oh and if you want my advise, do NOT share /home. Bad idea.
Mrugesh
Sometime on Mar 14, NM cobbled together some glyphs to say:
I got an idea. Keep all my files in /data which is a shared partition then since my username is same on all distros, recursive chmod it. And
but is your uid the same? username is just a string. uid is the real identifier.
On 3/16/06, Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
but is your uid the same? username is just a string. uid is the real identifier.
If you are distros based on the same architecture, it should work fine. For example, Debian and Ubuntu wont seemingly pose a problem. But again you have to take care of user management.
-- Regards, Sanket Medhi.
On Thursday 16 March 2006 03:02, Sanket Medhi wrote:
On 3/16/06, Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
but is your uid the same? username is just a string. uid is the real identifier.
I always manually set the UID and GID to 1000 and 100 on all distros, so I should be fine.
Nikhil
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Arun K. Khan -
Mrugesh Karnik -
Nikhil Marathe -
Philip Tellis -
Sanket Medhi -
Siddhesh Poyarekar