On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 22:14 +0530, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
> How do you share the home directory and its data on multiple distributions
> which may or may not have similar software without damaging the application
> preferences. eg. If KDE_DIR is different for two distributions then
> wallpapers normally blank out. How do you avoid that?
Just curious, why do you want to create this headache for yourself.
Depending on the distros you will run into problems with the location of
where the applications are installed as well as uid/gid issues.
IMO, it is best to settle on one distro and use it for your various
needs. If you want to get a "feel" for the various distros then try
virtualization.
Having said above, in the past I have shared /home with SuSE 9.3 and FC4
but don't do it anymore. Except for uid/gid mappings which I changed
with "chown -R <uid>:<gid> $HOME", applications like KDE, Openoffice,
Gnome worked fine.
Another option:
1. Have /home on the "root" partition for each distro itself, this
will allow you have distro specific dot files for the various
apps when you create the userid during the install process.
2. Have another partition (e.g. /dev/hda2) to hold your personal
dirs/files that you would normally have under $HOME.
3. Mount /dev/hda2 on /data and create a sub-dir with your userid
(that is common on all the distros you install). Give
read/write permission to this uid/gid.
4. Create sub dirs (folders) under above dir for other sub dirs and
files.
5. In your $HOME dir create links to the sub dirs and files you
have created in step 4. Keep in mind, you will still need to
change the mappings of uid:gid (as root or a boot script)
in /data/<userid> for each specific distro that you boot.
HTH,
--
Arun Khan
Linux is like a wigwam - no gates, no windows, apache inside
--
http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
