( Solved )cpartitions question

[gibbsre]

If I have 4 extended partitions with operating systems on each of the 4, and one partition mounted as ext2 /home, do all the operating systems use the /home partition, or do I need a separate partition for each operating system? Just curious. I am still trying to learn all the ins, and outs of partitioning, and the most effeceint way for all systems to run as smoothly, and quickly as is possible.
Thanks for any insight,

Ron

[DataMan]

If I have 4 extended partitions with operating systems on each of the 4, and one partition mounted as ext2 /home, do all the operating systems use the /home partition, or do I need a separate partition for each operating system? Just curious. I am still trying to learn all the ins, and outs of partitioning, and the most effeceint way for all systems to run as smoothly, and quickly as is possible.
Thanks for any insight,

Ron,

First a bit of clarification. You only have one extended partition within a hard drive. You will have partitions within the extended partition. The extended partition allows you to get around the mandatory max of 4 partitions within a hard drive.

Your question is can you conserve real estate by sharing a /home between ops. It really depends upon the ops, version, desktop type etc. I can only tell you that I tried it once with very unhappy consequences. I currently am supporting 4 different Lx ops on my application hard drive. Each of these ops has it's own /home on a separate partition.

One thing that you can and should share between your Lx's is the swap. You should only have one swap across all of your systems.

Hope this helps a bit.

DataMan

[gibbsre]

If I have 4 extended partitions with operating systems on each of the 4, and one partition mounted as ext2 /home, do all the operating systems use the /home partition, or do I need a separate partition for each operating system? Just curious. I am still trying to learn all the ins, and outs of partitioning, and the most effeceint way for all systems to run as smoothly, and quickly as is possible.
Thanks for any insight,

Ron,

First a bit of clarification. You only have one extended partition within a hard drive. You will have partitions within the extended partition. The extended partition allows you to get around the mandatory max of 4 partitions within a hard drive.

Your question is can you conserve real estate by sharing a /home between ops. It really depends upon the ops, version, desktop type etc. I can only tell you that I tried it once with very unhappy consequences. I currently am supporting 4 different Lx ops on my application hard drive. Each of these ops has it's own /home on a separate partition.

One thing that you can and should share between your Lx's is the swap. You should only have one swap across all of your systems.

Hope this helps a bit.

DataMan

I understand what your saying about the "only one extended partition", I just stated it incorrectly. My question then would be, how do you set up each /home partition? Do you place each one of the /home partitions next to each OS's partition, and do they need to be above, or below, as it were, to each OS ?
And yes, your reply was helpful, and I do have only one swap partition, apprx. twice the size of my available Ram.

Thanks, Ron

[kansasnoob]

You can not share a home partition efficiently between different operating systems!

If that's what you're asking?????????????????

Look at my current partition arrangement in post #3 here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... ost6963314

I store all of my critical data on external drives, but if you want to share data just create a truly separate data partition that's not dependent on any one OS!

[gibbsre]

You can not share a home partition efficiently between different operating systems!

If that's what you're asking?????????????????

Look at my current partition arrangement in post #3 here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... ost6963314

I store all of my critical data on external drives, but if you want to share data just create a truly separate data partition that's not dependent on any one OS!

I took a look, but I am somewhat confused. How did you label the partitions ie; mint/, mint/home ? can you actually write those exact words to label the partitions using gparted? That I guess is my biggest questio, that is how to accomplish this. If you can simply enter the OS name, and add /, and the OS name and /home.
If this is the case, then I follow what it is you are saying.
Thanks,

Ron

[atlef]

You can share your /home partition between all your systems, as long as you have different usernames for the distros you install.

atlef.

[DataMan]

I wouldn't worry about the labels with respect to your separate home partitions. Remember /home is mounted as home in your fstab at bootup time. The only thing to remember is that when you install the ops, do the manual install route and identify the pre-existing partition that you want for the ops home as /home.

DataMan

[altair4]

I can highly recommend having one shared data partition and then foregoing a separate /home partition for each distro.
rj

I have been running like this for years. I had 8 OS's on this box at one point and if I had to have 8 separate home partitions or even 8 separate user accounts on the same home partition I would have gone insane a lot earlier.

[gibbsre]

I can highly recommend having one shared data partition and then foregoing a separate /home partition for each distro. When you install Mint for instance, give your shared data partition the mountpoint /data (for example) but don't format it! Then just assign a further partition to / within which your home directory will be stored for that distro. You can do the same thing with all your Linux distros making sure each time that you remember not for format your /data partition.

You can always change default file paths to /data in all your applications eg Open Office, Firefox etc...

Example:

hda1 - swap (I understand it is better to have swap at the beginning of the drive
hda2 - /data (shared data partition)
hda3 - extended container
hda5 - / for Linux Mint
hda6 - / for Ubuntu
hda7 - / for Fedora



You get the idea. Then when a new version of your favourite distro is released you can install over any of the existing ones without compromising your data.

rj

This makes the most sense to me so far. Thanks for the good info. I have been following conversations all over many forums about partitioning, and this makes the most sense to me of all I have read. I do like to try out lots OS distros, if for nothing else to see how Linux is developing ( or not as the case may be ), and you just never know when you may find something you like to fiddle around with. I don't really have any productive hobbies, so I sort of like trying to learn all I can about Linux.

Thanks a lot!

Ron

[gibbsre]

I can highly recommend having one shared data partition and then foregoing a separate /home partition for each distro. When you install Mint for instance, give your shared data partition the mountpoint /data (for example) but don't format it! Then just assign a further partition to / within which your home directory will be stored for that distro. You can do the same thing with all your Linux distros making sure each time that you remember not for format your /data partition.

You can always change default file paths to /data in all your applications eg Open Office, Firefox etc...

Example:

hda1 - swap (I understand it is better to have swap at the beginning of the drive
hda2 - /data (shared data partition)
hda3 - extended container
hda5 - / for Linux Mint
hda6 - / for Ubuntu
hda7 - / for Fedora

You get the idea. Then when a new version of your favourite distro is released you can install over any of the existing ones without compromising your data.

rj

I am still unsure about something. Does the /data partition have to be a primary partition to be accessed by all distros ? Sorry for being so dense, but I want to do this right one time, and not lose all my saved stuff.

Ron