[GLLUG] Sharing /home
Ben Pfaff
blp@cs.stanford.edu
28 Apr 2003 13:16:06 -0700
"Chick Tower" <c.tower@express56.com> writes:
> I've been using Mandrake, but I decided to try another distro (Vector
> Linux) based upon reviews I read recently. It occurred to me that if
> I moved my /home to a separate partition, I could easily access my
> data from both distros. I have two questions about this.
Moving your /home to another partition is one way to do that.
However, you could easily share home directories without doing
that. Just mount the partition that has /home for one distro
into the filesystem of the other, then use a symlink for /home
that points into the mounted filesystem.
> 1) Would I do this by editing /etc/fstab and specifying a new mount
> point for /home?
Sure.
> 2) Might ths be a bad idea, since much of the desktop information
> for window managers is kept in users' home directories? The distros
> might have different versions of the window managers or application
> software.
In practice I doubt there would be real problems. Home
directories are often shared between many computers over NFS and
AFS and problems aren't that common. You can always specialize
certain files for a given distro using a login script along with
"uname" I suppose.
--
"The sound of peacocks being shredded can't possibly be
any worse than the sound of peacocks not being shredded."
Tanuki the Raccoon-dog in the Monastery