[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