On Sat, 26 Jan 2002 20:21:26 -0600, Michael Hipp wrote: > What are the problems to overcome in sharing /home among different distros? > > I have /home as a separate partition on Caldera 3.1 and I'd like to share it > with Desktop/LX (aka Redmond Linux). And maybe Mandrake and Elx eventually. > They all use KDE so that makes some things easier. > > One problem: on COL 3.1 I'm michael:x:500:100 whereas on Desktop/LX I'm > michael:x:100:100. Presumably I could just change the uid and chown > everything in /home/michael??? > > Thanks, > Michael
I've shared /home some and run into a few cases where config files were overwritten in another distro. I stopped sharing for that reason, but it worked with some distros. I'm sorry that I can't tell you which, but I can say for sure that I have not used Caldera, Redmond, Mandrake, or Elx in this way. I did use Slack, Debian, RedHat and I believe my problem was between RedHat and Debian. Like you said, you need to have compatible uid/gid. I did this by first making the user with the uid that I wanted on the /home on the / of the install. I brought up KDE and so on to see what the config files looked like. Then I changed /etc/fstab so that the shared /home was in it and mounted it after logging off the user. I made the uid match the numbers I already had on the files; so chown was not necessary. If I were going to share again, I would probably make two users on the shared /home - one would be the usual and the other would be with the name of the second distro. In my case I'd have ajlewis2 (for Debian) and redhat for the obvious. When booted in Redhat, I would use redhat. I could easily copy between the two directories with root and chown files as needed. I'd do this for a while and compare things. I might even make the redhat directory a duplicate of my ajlewis2 directory and see if things changed in it. If things looked compatible after a while, I'd switch over to using ajlewis2 in RedHat too. I'd umount /home and make the user ajlewis2 and then mount /home again in order to accomplish this. So, I'd say try it out, but do it safely with some testing. Anita _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
