Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:26:41 +0800, Andrew Lowe wrote: Thanks for the replies, I forgot about the config stuff sitting there in the home dir. I think the way around this for me is Pandu's suggestion of a different user name for each linux and using bind mount. I normally use the same username but a different home directory, so my Gentoo home directory is /home/nelz and my SUSE one would be /home/nelz-suse. That way you can keep the same username, and UID, in both distros and not run into permission problems. Sharing directories can then be done simply with symlinks. However, for one app, a VM would probably be a better solution. Not only would it save all this hassle, it would also save having to reboot every time you wanted to run the program. -- Neil Bothwick One difference between a man and a machine is that a machine is quiet when well oiled. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /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? No. As long as SUSE supports the file system on /home you're using in Gentoo it will work fine, and that's very likely. When you're booted into SUSE, run cat /proc/filesystems to see what it supports. If your Gentoo /home file system is not there, you may need to load the module, eg. on this system; # grep ext /proc/filesystems ext2 ext4 # modprobe ext3 # grep ext /proc/filesystems ext2 ext4 ext3
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On 28/12/2011 10:28 AM, Adam Carter wrote: . 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? No. As long as SUSE supports the file system on /home you're using in Gentoo it will work fine, and that's very likely. When you're booted into SUSE, run cat /proc/filesystems to see what it supports. If your Gentoo /home file system is not there, you may need to load the module, eg. on this system; # grep ext /proc/filesystems ext2 ext4 # modprobe ext3 # grep ext /proc/filesystems ext2 ext4 ext3 Good, thanks for that. Andrew
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On Dec 28, 2011 7:52 AM, Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au 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? I'm not doing anything snazzy such as LVM or encryption, just bog standard Linux. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Regards, Andrew Another important factor is desktop environment. Various settings can cause troubles in either ones.
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On Wednesday 28 December 2011 02:21:25 Andrew Lowe wrote: 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? Beware! Whichever your preferred desktop (kde, gnome, whatever), having your whole home directory shared between distros is a recipe for disaster. You only need one program to differ in version number between distros to render the whole lot unusable. Consider, for instance, the current difficulty of incompatible versions of kmail between 4.4 and 4.7. My preference is to have a /home/user/common partition mounted in each distro, containing everything I want accessible at all times, but leave things like .kde4 dedicated to the distro that's running it. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On Dec 28, 2011 9:40 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan cont...@nileshgr.com wrote: On Dec 28, 2011 7:52 AM, Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au 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? I'm not doing anything snazzy such as LVM or encryption, just bog standard Linux. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Regards, Andrew Another important factor is desktop environment. Various settings can cause troubles in either ones. True. My suggestion would be to not share your ~ directly, but instead share something *under* ~ E.g. : mkdir ~/sharedstuff mount /dev/sdxx ~/sharedstuff Another alternative would be to ensure that you are not using the same username in both OS, and just do a bindmount. Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On 28/12/2011 10:49 AM, Pandu Poluan wrote: On Dec 28, 2011 9:40 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan cont...@nileshgr.com mailto:cont...@nileshgr.com wrote: On Dec 28, 2011 7:52 AM, Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au mailto:a...@wht.com.au wrote: [snip] ... ... ... [snip] True. My suggestion would be to not share your ~ directly, but instead share something *under* ~ E.g. : mkdir ~/sharedstuff mount /dev/sdxx ~/sharedstuff Another alternative would be to ensure that you are not using the same username in both OS, and just do a bindmount. Rgds, People, Thanks for the replies, I forgot about the config stuff sitting there in the home dir. I think the way around this for me is Pandu's suggestion of a different user name for each linux and using bind mount. Thanks for the info, Andrew
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
If its only one app, why not use a small vm (qemu, vbox etc.)? - best of both worlds. Also, why only on Suse? - you can often work around differences with ld-preload and other tricks. BillK -Original Message- From: Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:21:25 +0800 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? I'm not doing anything snazzy such as LVM or encryption, just bog standard Linux. Any thoughts greatly appreciated. Regards, Andrew
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On 28/12/2011 1:30 PM, W.Kenworthy wrote: If its only one app, why not use a small vm (qemu, vbox etc.)? - best of both worlds. Basically because I've done nothing with these thingies and have no experience with them and therefore didn't think of them.. Might be worth looking into - got a link to a 20 words or less intro? Also, why only on Suse? - you can often work around differences with ld-preload and other tricks. The third party app is under development, I'm tying some stuff into it, and things are a bit fluid at the moment. I think basically taking a couple of hours to set something up once and that's it is quicker than trying to work around library problems that will arise in an ongoing manner. BillK Andrew
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au wrote: On 28/12/2011 10:49 AM, Pandu Poluan wrote: On Dec 28, 2011 9:40 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan cont...@nileshgr.com mailto:cont...@nileshgr.com wrote: On Dec 28, 2011 7:52 AM, Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au mailto:a...@wht.com.au wrote: [snip] ... ... ... [snip] True. My suggestion would be to not share your ~ directly, but instead share something *under* ~ E.g. : mkdir ~/sharedstuff mount /dev/sdxx ~/sharedstuff Another alternative would be to ensure that you are not using the same username in both OS, and just do a bindmount. Rgds, People, Thanks for the replies, I forgot about the config stuff sitting there in the home dir. I think the way around this for me is Pandu's suggestion of a different user name for each linux and using bind mount. There's a big one nobody mentioned: Different versions of different apps. In flipping a /home back and forth between different Linux distributions running different versions of (mostly) the same software, I've had apps crash. *Usually*, this happens when dotfiles were created by newer versions of a program, and then read by an older version, but I've seen it break going the other way, too. The other (relatively mild) bit are UID/GID mappings for permissions. As long as your login users and related groups in /etc/passwd and /etc/group have the same UIDs and GIDs in both OSs, you should be just fine. I got bit when I flipped back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu; Fedora started things at UID 500, Ubuntu started things at UID 1000. Files that had been created by my user account on one system couldn't be read by my user account on the other without chowning them. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap
bunyip ~ # esearch VirtualBox [ Results for search key : VirtualBox ] [ Applications found : 8 ] * app-emulation/virtualbox Latest version available: 4.0.12 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 67,936 kB Homepage:http://www.virtualbox.org/ Description: Family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use License: GPL-2 ... I'd recommend vbox then ... just works. Almost as easy as dual boot and less risk to the base system (i.e., getting the disk order wrong on install and overwriting the existing OS) - by the way sharing your home directory (vs /home as a different user) is fraught - many apps use different configs depending on versions - 'evolution' for instance could really break your email as later versions switch to a database format and subsequent versions fiddle with it. Install it, open vbox-manager from the menu and create a new VM with whatever specs you want, put the CD for suse in and point the Vbox CD to it in setup and go. You might need to read up on kernel options for virtualisation if you have a customised kernel vs genkernel to get the best (almost native) performance. Love vms for dev work - snapshot it regularly so you can wind back the clock when necessary ... BillK -Original Message- From: Andrew Lowe a...@wht.com.au Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing /home and swap Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:37:34 +0800 On 28/12/2011 1:30 PM, W.Kenworthy wrote: If its only one app, why not use a small vm (qemu, vbox etc.)? - best of both worlds. Basically because I've done nothing with these thingies and have no experience with them and therefore didn't think of them.. Might be worth looking into - got a link to a 20 words or less intro? Also, why only on Suse? - you can often work around differences with ld-preload and other tricks. The third party app is under development, I'm tying some stuff into it, and things are a bit fluid at the moment. I think basically taking a couple of hours to set something up once and that's it is quicker than trying to work around library problems that will arise in an ongoing manner. BillK Andrew
