On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:49:17 +0100
Jan Ritzerfeld
Am Samstag, 14. Januar 2012 schrieb Bob Williams:
I've just installed openSUSE 12.1 on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, alongside an existing 11.4 installation. In other words, each system has its own / (root) partition, but they should both mount the same /home partition, which is encrypted. 12.1 is on /dev/sda3, 11.4 is on /dev/sda6, both formatted with ext4. [...]
For testing purposes I use a similar setup. However, I did not try to use my common encrypted home for both installations, yet. But I successfully updated several times this way from older versions. So, I fear I will have the same problems like you in the near future!
The 12.1 grub menu allows me to choose the 11.4 system to boot, but selecting this option takes me to the 11.4 grub menu first, from where I select the system I want to boot, eg 11.4 desktop, 11.4 failsafe or Windows, but it doesn't know about 12.1.
I think this is another story: grub is installed to the root partition and this partition is marked as active. The generic MBR code just boots the active partition, that is, sda3 with 12.1. The 12.1 installer detected your 11.4 installation and added a grub menu entry that simply boots from sda6 the same way the old MBR did when sda6 with 11.4 was marked as active. If you want to go back to 11.4 without having to go through the 12.1 grub, you have to mark sda6 active again. However, before doing that, please make sure that my assumptions hold true and you can recover to the current setup. That is, you remember which partition is active now and you know how to boot from a CD or USB and change back the active partition from there.
What do I need to change to access my encrypted partition in 12.1 and mount it under /home? [...]
I strongly discourage you from using your home with 11.4 after you have used it with 12.1! Make an encrypted backup of your 11.4 home before you use it with 12.1 in case you want to go back.
Gruß Jan
Hi Bob; One way to eliminate the problems with a common /home is not to have them common but rather to have a separate partition that only stores common DATA, not configurations and the like. You could put folders like Documents, Music, Mail, etc. in a partition called say /common with symlinks from each separate /home to those folders. One of the most obvious problems with a common /home is that different distros (or even different versions of a distro) may well have different versions pf programs with differences in their configuration files. When run in different distros or versions the results may be unexpected or even catastrophic. Tom -- Tom Taylor - retired penguin openSUSE 11.4 x86_64 openSUSE 12.1 KDE 4.6.00, FF 4.0 KDE 4.7.2, FF 8.0 claws-mail 3.7.9 registered linux user 263467 linxt-At-comcast-DoT-net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org