On Thursday, June 07, 2012 03:42:55 PM Chris Knadle wrote: > > I'll mention this even though I'm not necessarily suggesting it -- sometimes > it's possible to use a shared "test" /home partition and a single swap > partition across several distributions. A shared /home partition can work > where the software used is of similar version levels. An example of where > this becomes strange is if the /home partition was installed by Ubuntu > which uses AppArmor, but then the same /home partition is used by Fedora > which expects files to have extended attributes for use with SELinux which > are now missing. [It's sometimes possible to add the extended attributes > later, and they may or may not be necessary for /home depending on the > SELinux policy being used.] > Based on my multiboot experience, I think it is safer to begin by not trying to share swap or /home partitions among distros, or at least to investigate it via google search.
In 2008 I tried to share a swap partition between Fedora and Ubuntu. Originally the PC had Fedora only. I then installed Ubuntu and instructed it to use the same swap partition as Fedora was using. Subsequently, Fedora would boot but KDE froze and gkrellm reported zero swap space. I found a thread in Fedoraforum "sharing swap partitions with kubuntu". I ended up giving up on trying to share a swap partition among distros. (I didn't pursue trying to understand the reason for the failure.) IIRC, I investigated via google search the possibility of sharing /home among distros. The immediate result was that this won't work. The apps have hidden files (dot files) on /home. For example, Firefox on distro A will conflict with Firefox on distro B. . _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jul 11 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 1 - Pimp My Network Sep 5 - OpenStack
