Moving Home

[cakehead]

I have read about storing /Home on a different drive many times on this forum. Curiosity has the better of me and I would like someone to confirm how to go about doing this as I like to play around with Linux; though I don't want to loose all my files. How do I point to /Home on a different drive and how do I create an extended drive. Thanks, John

[Husse]

an extended drive

There is no such beast...
Partition - yes - you can have 4 primary partitions an extended partition included
This is handled by G/QTParted
There is a wiki about moving home
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _partition
It does not matter if the home partition is on the same or another drive as long as it is always connected An external drive is no good here

[cakehead]

Thanks for the reply Husse, and I know ! " extended drive" shame on me, I do know better. I am very familiar with F-Disk but my MS days are well and truly over I am glad to say. Gparted is slightly different and I am still trying to get my head around it as my wife won't let me play for long these days !!

[helterskelter]

If you have home on a seperate partition allready (sda1=/ sda2=swap sda3=/home) then load your 'new' distro on a 'live' basis,
use this to expose the dot files on your /home partition and delete them all.

Shut down and restart with the new distro in your cd/dvd drive for installation.
During this process do a MANUAL partition setup.
Be sure to select the same /home partition for your new install but do not select to re-format.

Hope this is what you meant.

eddie

Mmmmmm, nice mints!

[Fred]

cakehead,

If you like to play around with different distros I suggest you look at my posts in the below linked thread. I have tried lots of different setups to make it as easy as possible to try different distros as the mood strikes me. The separate /home solution has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. To start with, a separate /boot, /, and /home partition for each distro soon turns into a nightmare of a partition table with only a few distros.

You also have to do a good bit of work to save and/or restore your old desktop configurations if you decide you don't like the new distro desktop as much as the old.

It gets worse from there. /Home can be, and usually is, completely incompatible between distros, severely limiting the distros you can try and share /home with. I am not saying having a separate /home is a bad idea. Just that it isn't as trouble free for distro hopping and experimentation as you might think.

What I am now doing is putting all my data into one or more separate partitions and mounting them in the /home directory. If you use the same user name and password on all your distro installs, you won't have any permission problems sharing these data partitions between distros. If you need to use different user names thats ok. You just have to set the permissions on your data files so any user has read/write privileges. Or create empty user shells with all the user names and put them into a group that has read/write privileges for each distro.

Doing it like that protects your data in case the install is a total disaster, or you break everything to the point you can't get into you /home at all. It also allows you to see what the distro desktop looks like "out of the box" without a lot of adjustments. You will also have quick, easy access to your data from the new distro.

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=10043&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=30

Hope this is helpful.

Fred

[Husse]

You can share home between a fairly large range of distros, but there are some caveats with it.
I just installed the KDE CE sharing home with the main edition and at least for now I'm stuck with having to change session to gnome and kde respectively all the time. Session type/state is saved in the same file obviously. Otherwise it's better this way as kde and gnome is using different sets of config files... no conflicts....

[Fred]

Husse,

You can share home between a fairly large range of distros, but there are some caveats with it.

I am afraid I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you on your first point. I guess "fairly wide range" is in the eyes of the beholder, but I would have to say it is pretty risky business to try to share /home between a wide range of distros. A few examples. Try sharing /home among Mint 4 KDE, Sidux, Suse 10.3, Fedora, Slackware, and Sabayon. I think you might change your mind after that exercise in futility.

I agree with your second point. There are some caveats with sharing /home. One of them is not knowing ahead of time if you are going to have big issues with the /home partition. Unless of course you are already quite familiar with the structure and requirements of the distro in question. In which case you probably wouldn't need to test and play with it anyway.

Sorry, but I am going to have to stick with my original comments about sharing /home with multiple distros. We will just have to agree to disagree.

What a separate /home partition is good for is to isolate your data from the system itself and provide a good path for upgrading to the next version of the same distro. Doing this allows you to keep the desktop settings you have evolved to your way of doing things, instead of having to redo it all.

Enjoy life,

Fred

[Husse]

@ Fred
I wrote fairly wide range. I should have been more careful with how I wrote this
I would think in our case debian based
There is a post by scorp123 which I can't find where he describes a really wide mix of distros using the same home
And I definitely did not mean that we could share it with Slackware, Sabayon or Gentoo
But generally sharing between kde and gnome is better than with the sane DE as they mostly use different config files
And it's nice to have someone knowledgeable to review my postings

[Fred]

Husse,

But generally sharing between kde and gnome is better than with the same DE as they mostly use different config files.
And it's nice to have someone knowledgeable to review my postings

On your first point, we can now agree.

On your second point, I am not so sure. I have just been around a long time. Sometimes I am not so sure that equates to knowlege.

I like it better when you are reviewing my postings so I can get it right in the end.

Enjoy life,

Fred