On Friday 25 November 2005 05:00, John Ryan wrote:
Hello,
I am in the process of setting up a multi-boot
system, where I may have Suse, Ubuntu and possibly another
variant of linux. (I am in learning mode)
Will there be any problems if I mount /home on one
partition (say on /dev/hda5), and use that partition as /home for all
of the flavours of linux?
Would there be conflicts when installing one system if another already
has its /home on /dev/hda5 or when upgrading? i.e. will the upgrade or install wipe
the existing /home?
Would there be any problems with using Gnome on one linux and kde on another?
Would it be OK to share say Thunderbird email between the different flavours
even if the versions of Thurderbird differed slightly?
Is it a good idea?
There can be problems. Probably all can be resolved in one way or another. Here is a starter list to consider... 1) Possibility of one installation wiping out the home directory of another: There are probably steps you can take during installation ("advanced partitioning") to cover this, but I would only tell the first installation about the home partition then put the fstab info into the other distros after they were installed. 2a) Actual user/group IDs (not the names but the numerical IDs): Not all distros may choose to use the same numerical ID for users or groups. You will probably need to edit /etc/passwd. 2b) This might require extra care if each distro uses a different pasword scheme (MD5, legacy, etc.). 2c) Some distros have different schemes for using groups. For example SuSE puts all users in a group named "users". Red Hat creates a separate group for each user (with a name to match the user's name). 3) .profile, .bashrc, etc. Different distros may require different contents for these files, depending on how fancy you got with them. (e.g. Java directory specifications, etc. 4) Other applications' config files: I know I have dozens of "dot" files and directories for application configurations. These may not all be compatible with different versions of these apps on different distros. Even if they are compatible from an application point of view there might be things unique to different distros (path info, etc.) 5) I am sure there are more ...