On 12/28/2011 04:21 AM, Andrew Lowe wrote:
Hi all, I usually use Gentoo as my "normal" Linux but a third party app I'm about to start using only runs on SUSE. To this end, I'm about to set aside a smaller partition and install the minimal amnount of SUSE I need to run the app. My question is regarding /home and swap. Is there anything in my current Gentoo /home and swap that "locks" them to the Gentoo install or can I share them between the two installs? What I mean by share is that when I boot up Gentoo can I mount /home and swap and everything is fully accessible and then reboot into SUSE and once again mount them and everything is once again fully accessible?
At a low level, only swap can't be shared 100% due to suspend to disk. If you are not using suspend to disk, then you can share swap without any problems. But if you suspend one OS and then boot into the other, the suspend data is going to be corrupted. At best you'll crash when trying to resume, at worst you'll resume OK but will get corrupted data.
At the OS level, /home can be shared without problems. At the application level (and I'm talking about KDE, Gnome and other DEs here), you could get bugs or weird behavior due to using different versions of the same DE.
