aperahama Posted November 4, 2003 Report Share Posted November 4, 2003 I am using Mandrake 9.1 as my main distribution but I like to play around with other distro from time to time. In the past I've used a seperate partition for the /home when experimenting. Can I safely use my /home partition with different distro without causing too many problems??? :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzylizard Posted November 4, 2003 Report Share Posted November 4, 2003 Theoretically, probably. But I would be very carefull about conflicting config directories. You don't want one distro to set certain user settings in your .kde directory and then have those overwritten by the second distro. If you were to go this route, I would make certain that you use very different window managers / file managers in each distro. You may have problems with any other software that creates a user preferences directory in your home directory. (i.e. any program that creates a .foo directory) Just my thoughts on the matter though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted November 4, 2003 Report Share Posted November 4, 2003 yeah you should be able to that safely .... altho' I would stil advise backing your home partition just incase ;) easy way to do that is from commandline as root dd if=/dev/hdX of=/root/home-backup.iso Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest timelord Posted November 4, 2003 Report Share Posted November 4, 2003 (edited) What if you just used different user names in your two distros? Would that work? Edited November 4, 2003 by timelord Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted November 4, 2003 Report Share Posted November 4, 2003 What if you just used different user names in your two distros? Would that work?That's the most trouble free way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sitor Posted November 6, 2003 Report Share Posted November 6, 2003 Similar question, but slightly different: Having two machines with one in primary use and another from time to time on same network, would it be possible to use the second one to use the data from the /home from the primary for its apps. More concretely, could you run e.g. your mail client (Evolution) on the second one, while reading and writing all data on the primary /home. This in order that when you use the primary again that all your mails, etc. are present. I assume this should be easy to set-up, but as a regular home user and linux noob,... Anyone that can give me any tips on this? Thanks, Sitor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted November 6, 2003 Report Share Posted November 6, 2003 I've used the same /home shared between two distro's, same username. the only problem i ran into was the UID of the user, i had to make sure they were the same on both distro's (or else i wouldn't have the proper permissions for my own home dir ;-) ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted November 6, 2003 Report Share Posted November 6, 2003 I think the bottom line on this is yes you can ... but be careful vis UID,GID etc. and the same when installing software that might add stuff into your home directory but use relative links etc. or point somewhere that doesn\t exist in your other disto. 90% of stuff should be OK and when something isn\t then its usually no big deal, you just need to find what the problem is and edit the link etc. Potential places are say the .Desktop directory where an app link points to an app which isn\t in the other distro. Ultimately you could share /usr as well ... but this is a bit more problematic ... strictly speaking it should work ... if everyone follows the rules but .... of course not everyone does... So if for instance you use Gentoo and Mandrake you will have problems with KDE because Gentoo installs it where its meant to go (as defined by KDE) wheras Mandrake doesn\t... You could of course change the Makefile in Gentoo to follow Mandrake or install KDE from source in Mandrake but its sorta missing the advantages of both out... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted November 7, 2003 Report Share Posted November 7, 2003 Yes it would work fine. I shared my partition with debian and mandy for a while. HOwever, If i was running GNOme 2.4 in Debian and GNOME 2.2 in Mandy i would have problems with the config files. Mainly because they are different. BUt for most things, unless there has been a major change in config format, it would be OK. Some older apps might delete config they dont know of that is from a newer verrsion, but htats not too common. YOu should be fine. Try to keep versions similar. For big stuff anyway. Also: use the same version of mozilla/firebird in both, Firebird wont work with skins from older versions, and same with newer versions. I had no problems really. iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aperahama Posted November 7, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 7, 2003 Thank you for your help everybody :D I feel alot happier about going down this road after what I have read here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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