[20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

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Halvor_Raknes
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[20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

I have a 465 GB HDD and I want to install several OSes. I'm starting with LM 20.3.

When I get to the "Installation type" step of the installation I select "Something else".

Then what? The installation guide does not explain what steps to take, which buttons to click.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by JoeFootball »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Then what?
The + button will add a partition (if space exists). The - button will delete a partition. And the Change button will edit a partition, where you could define one for /, and another for /home.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by vanadium »

"Something else" indeed puts you in charge. You need to create the partitions you wish (one for root, one for /home), indicate the file system they should contain (can be ext4), and indicate where they should be mounted in the file system (one as /, the other as /home). Optionally, you also can create a third partition for swap, or, if you already have one, assign the existing one for swap in your new installation. If you do not, the installer by default will set up a swapfile instead.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by acerimusdux »

While you can probably partition from within the installer, it may be easier to create your partitions beforehand with a tool like gparted (also available on the live ISO which has the installer). On a modern EFI system, you will need an EFI partition to exist, a small partition (maybe 500M), with boot and esp flags set.

For creating partitions, you typically select the free space, choose create, move a slider to set the size of the new partition, maybe give it a label, possibly format with your chosen filesystm.

In the installer, you select a partition you want to use, choose "use as", choose ext4 to be the filesystem for your linux partitions, and again choose to format and install the filesystem. And you choose a mount point. You must have / chosen as a mount point for one partition, a separate /home is optional but a good idea. You don't need to choose the efi partition here, it just needs to exist and have the flags set. You also don't need a swap partition, as it will just use a swap file, and on modern systems with plenty of ram will rarely use it.

The part on the bottom which asks where the boatloader should be installed, you can probably leave on the default. This doesn't get installed to a partition, it should rather identify only the drive.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Flemur »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 9:37 am I have a 465 GB HDD and I want to install several OSes. I'm starting with LM 20.3.

When I get to the "Installation type" step of the installation I select "Something else".

Then what? The installation guide does not explain what steps to take, which buttons to click.
It IS kinda sparse on "something else"

Open the install guide, https://linuxmint-installation-guide.re ... stall.html
and search for "Something else"; for a /home parition, do what it says for "/" but with a different, additional partition, IOW, where it shows mount point "/", use "/home" as the mount point for the additional partition.

PS: I hope you don't intend to use the same /home partition on several OSes; if you do, don't be surprised by strange problems.

PS2, you don't need a swap partition, Mint 20.x (and 19.x?) use a swapfile.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
Your data and OS are backed up....right?
Halvor_Raknes
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

Flemur wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:34 am PS: I hope you don't intend to use the same /home partition on several OSes; if you do, don't be surprised by strange problems.
I don't. I have seen several people warning like you. What I hope I can do is to specify the location of config files/directories for certain applications to one location in only one of the home directories.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Larry78723 »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:18 pm What I hope I can do is to specify the location of config files/directories for certain applications to one location in only one of the home directories.
That sure sounds like you're going to share one of the /home directories.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

Larry78723 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:31 pm
Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:18 pm What I hope I can do is to specify the location of config files/directories for certain applications to one location in only one of the home directories.
That sure sounds like you're going to share one of the /home directories.
Yes, but apparently that must be done on an app by app basis and not generally.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Flemur »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 1:18 pmWhat I hope I can do is to specify the location of config files/directories for certain applications to one location in only one of the home directories.
AFAIK you can't specify where the config files will go, but you could use links to make them use the same physical storage; I do that with several programs, so more than one linux OS uses the same config files:

~/.mozilla is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/mozilla
~/.config/xnviewmp is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/xnviewmp
~/.config/google-chrome is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/google-chrome

Note that they point to what is otherwise a "data" partition (with mp3 and jpg files, etc), not to another /home partition.

Edit: the installations of programs are also shared, so it's exactly the same software which is sharing the config files, IOW they're normally installed under /opt, but...
/opt/XnView -> /mnt/DATA/SOFT/inst/xnview
/opt/firefox -> /mnt/DATA/SOFT/inst/firefox
/opt/google -> /mnt/DATA/SOFT/inst/google
/opt/ocenaudio -> /mnt/DATA/SOFT/inst/ocenaudio
Last edited by Flemur on Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

Flemur wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:59 pm AFAIK you can't specify where the config files will go, but you could use links to make them use the same physical storage; I do that with several programs, so more than one linux OS uses the same config files:

~/.mozilla is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/mozilla
~/.config/xnviewmp is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/xnviewmp
~/.config/google-chrome is a link to /mnt/DATA/SOFT/user/google-chrome
OK. I haven't learned about links yet. Thank you!
Note that they point to what is otherwise a "data" partition (with mp3 and jpg files, etc), not to another /home partition.
Does that mean it wouldn't work if the link was to a a file under ~/.config/ in the root partition of the other OS?
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Flemur »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:41 pm Does that mean it wouldn't work if the link was to a a file under ~/.config/ in the root partition of the other OS?
It would work, but you'd have to mount that other OS's root partition, which is probably a bad idea.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

Flemur wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:43 pm
Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:41 pm Does that mean it wouldn't work if the link was to a a file under ~/.config/ in the root partition of the other OS?
It would work, but you'd have to mount that other OS's root partition, which is probably a bad idea.
Oh, sorry, I meant home partition! (that's where the config files belong, right?)
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by ajgreeny »

On my dual boot system, which many years ago was a multiboot with 5 different Linux OSs, I had my main daily driver system with a separate /home partition but for all the other OSs left /home as a folder in the root partition and then created symbolic links to all the data folders in the main OS's /home.

Doing it this way makes it appear that the data files are sitting in the /home of all OSs though that data does not actually sit in the other OS homes but is still in the one place. All configurations and the hidden folders were created in each OS so there were no problems of configuration incompatibility.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Flemur »

Halvor_Raknes wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:59 pm
Flemur wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:43 pm It would work, but you'd have to mount that other OS's root partition, which is probably a bad idea.
Oh, sorry, I meant home partition! (that's where the config files belong, right?)
Yes, user config files go under a /home/username directory. I think it's still probably a bad idea (edit: to use the files from one OS's /home with another OS) , or at least iffy, which is why I didn't do it (plus I think the default setup of having $HOME/Documents,Music, etc, is a bad idea since it mixes the OS settings and non-OS files like mp3s. So I consider my $HOME (always a directory on the "/" partition) as part of each OS and never store or download any non-OS files to $HOME, so I don't have any separate /home partitions, each is part of the "/" partition for each OS and none of them contain any data files.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] if/when it is solved!
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by acerimusdux »

It might not cause too many problems sharing a /home between closely related linuxes, like say only debian based distros. But even there, you would run into things like configurations files which set a particular font or theme or icon that is available in one and not another. Or just changes that have been made in one distro that cause you to want different settings.

I have switched between different distros using the same /home, but only when actually installing a new distro to use. In that case, this preserves most of my settings, and ends up a big time saver. But it would not be convenient to be switching back and forth regularly.

One simple way to handle this, if you prefer to have a single partition for all the /home folders, would be to simply use a different user name in each os. So /home would be mounted in each, but they would each use a different directory on /home. Then you could just create symlinks in them to your main user account after installation for all of the non-hidden folders you would actually want to share; Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. But probably best not to share Desktop.

And if it is the first user created in each, they should have the same user id, 1000, so any one user would still own all of the files and have access if needed.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Reddog1 »

Can I ask 'Why are you planning on installing several Linux (I presume only Linux since talk is of sharing /home) on a single hard drive? I've done it, just to see how it works, but it is a needlessly complicated process since easy-to-install virtual machines happened.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Halvor_Raknes »

Reddog1 wrote: Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:03 pm Can I ask 'Why are you planning on installing several Linux (I presume only Linux since talk is of sharing /home) on a single hard drive? I've done it, just to see how it works, but it is a needlessly complicated process since easy-to-install virtual machines happened.
I have been using Mint for almost two years now. I have a none year old laptop, so I figured I would like to try out a more lightweight distro also, besides, I'm curious to test out stuff… I think I have settled on EndeavourOS.

And I also want to install Haiku!
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by Reddog1 »

If I were you, I'd install VirtualBox and then install whatever system you want to try as a virtual machine. You can install (and delete if you want) many virtual machines with many different distributions without messing with your host system partitioning. There is an underutilized Virtual Machines section of this forum if you have questions. This desktop is a 2013 core i5 with 8GB of ram and I'm running, as virtual machines with a Mint 20 host:
Windows 10
Windows 7 64-bit
Windows 7 32-bit
Sparky Linux 5 Xfce (which I'm typing this using)
FreeBSD 12
Q4OS kde
EndeavorOS (which I just installed because you made me curious--haven't tested in much, seems pretty nice--Xfce version)

The Linux systems I keep and run as vm's tend to be lighter weight and I don't notice much of anything as far as latency goes. I like Sparky and Q4OS a lot.
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by cretsiah »

if you have the computing power i would suggest Reddog1 way first..

if not the computing power but do have the SSD / HDD space then i would look at what

Flemur said
Open the install guide, https://linuxmint-installation-guide.re ... stall.html
and

JoeFootball said
The + button will add a partition (if space exists). The - button will delete a partition. And the Change button will edit a partition, where you could define one for /, and another for /home.
but if YOU really really want to do the multi home option try looking here
https://askubuntu.com/questions/55224/a ... tributions
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Re: [20.3] I want a separate /home partition and the official installation guide is of no help

Post by tinass »

vanadium wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:22 am Optionally, you also can create a third partition for swap, or, if you already have one, assign the existing one for swap in your new installation. If you do not, the installer by default will set up a swapfile instead.
Thank you for this line, I have been racking my brain on how to partition for the swap as I just partitioned for the root directory as per the instructions and was puzzled as to how to partition for swap, as it was like an add on note after the root directory steps were completed.

Thanks again :)
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