Shared Home Dual Boot

[Acid_1]

As the topic may suggest, how would one go around sharing a home folder. my current home is in /home on my mint partition. that's all I am currently running. I want gOS to be my second, and want it to use the mint /home rather than its own. thanks

[Fred]

Acid_1,

There are a number of ways to go about doing it. I'll tell you how I do it. It is a kind of sharing, not really sharing all of /home.

I use a separate /home for each distribution because of the different config files, set-ups, and desktops used for various distros. I have one machine that I use to play with lots of various distros that of course changes as the mood strikes me. I usually only give about 2 Gig each to the /Home partitions on this machine. Really I don't need to even put /home on a seperate partition doing it this way, but old habits die hard.

My user name is "fred" on all the distros, surprise surprise. I create a folder in /home called "data". This folder is mounted on a separate 30 Gig. partition as /home/fred/data/. This partition has all my documents, music, pictures, and other misc. junk in it.

So when I put a new distro on the computer I just create a folder in home and mount it in /etc/fstab. That way regardless of which distro I am using at the time all my data is accessible in /home of that distro.

I guess you would call that a compromise, but I do it so I can see the way each distro is configured out of the box before being tampered with. It also makes it practical to share, some what, between very different kinds of distros.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Fred

[Fred]

Acid_1,

If you want to truly just share the /home partition between distros it is a bit easier. Just let the new distro install all in root. It makes it much much easier if you use the same user name and password for both distros. After you install the distro go into /etc/fstab and change the mount point for /home to the partition that /home was mounted for the other distro. This is probably the easiest way to do it with all the various methods used to install distros.

Couple of warnings here though. You will have some rather serious problems if you are using two different desk tops, ie Gnome and KDE. Also, even if you have the same desktop on both distros there may be a few differences in the config files that you will have to deal with. So it isn't a completely trouble free operation. The amount of trouble just depends on the two distros involved. I haven't looked at gOS, so I can't really express an opinion there.

Fred

[Fred]

Acid_1,

I'll go you one better than that. You could do both of the above methods. You could create two user names for each distro where one user name shares the /home folder and the other only shares the data folder and has its' own desktop and config setup in /home.

You see, that is the beauty of Linux. Your imagination is your most limiting factor.

Enjoy,

Fred

[Acid_1]

Thanks all (Fred )
I think I am going to make four partitions. 1st for Mint, 2nd for gOS, 3rd as a blank ext3 partition, and fourth for a 1 gig swap. On the third there'll be /home, and the rest will mount it on boot.