[Gllug] Trips or traps? A single home partition shared between 2 distributions

[John Edwards]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:47:56PM +0100, M.Blackmore wrote:
> What gotchas can getcha if one has a single home partition and a couple
> of different distributions (used for different things - don't ask) on
> different partitions?
> 
> Not quite what I'd chose but if thats what she and daughter wants I'll
> try and accomodate...
> 
> But surely there must be some gotcha in having home shared between two
> distributions (even though both ubuntu based)...
> 
> My instinct would be to make up another computer from the bits box - got
> enough for one more 1.4ghz machine which I've just got booted up OK on
> the workbench, out of a case, and got cases galore to chose from and a
> modest disk spare and a dvd burner spare - and use of a kvm I've got
> doing
> nowt. 
> 
> But complaints that footwell space is already very tight are quite valid
> so this doubling up would not be popular.
> 
> So back to gotchas on a single shared /home partition - are there any?

The most obvious one to me if the distributions have different version
of packages that store config files in the home directory, and they
have different options or syntax. Usual suspects here are Gnome and
KDE.

With Ubuntu you should not met differences in ext2/3 versions and
mount options. And the future releases should be backwards compatible.


I often have a smallish /home and NFS mount the main file store
somewhere else. In your case the file store would be a seperate
partition mounted somewhere (/data maybe??).

But that always doesn't work well for users that are used to putting
thing "on the desktop" (eg in .gnome or .kde somewhere). Of course
symlinks can help here, though might need a couple of tries before
you catch everything.


Another way to do it is to get a little thin client box (~100 GBP) and
install LTSP on the main machine. That way the thin client will access
a different install.

You could even have both running at the same time if you needed to,
either sharing through a KVM or with different peripherals. Then in
the future when two people want to use computers at the same time you
can use a spare keyboard/mouse/monitor.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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