Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I think Snowhog is as anal as I am!

Touche!

I like organization.

Mine is a totally over-done desktop

4 - 500gb hard drives, all partitioned the same:

Two terabytes! Geez. Why so little?

[claydoh]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I see no problem sharing a /home partition, but you would have to use different usernames for each OS. I have been doing this for years myself, though I now only keep to 2 at a time now, maybe 3.





(I am never going to keep up with Snowhog and dibl 's post counts )

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

(I am never going to keep up with Snowhog and dibl 's post counts )

We have no lives (well, maybe I don't have one!)

[claydoh]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

We have no lives (well, maybe I don't have one!)

have you thawed out yet? that might explain the extra time , plus I only work 50+ hours at work on a slow week

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I only work 50+ hours at work on a slow week

50+! On a SLOW week!! Geez, dude, you need to slow down and smell the roses.

Spring is well on its way here. Still getting down into the high 30's/low 40's at night, but low to mid 50' during the day, at least where I'm at.

[claydoh]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

naw, people need to eat, and someone has to smack, err , wrangle, err manage the help

We just got out of the 50's/30's up here, hit 70 or so today

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

Just visited your web sight. :-X :P

Not sure I've seen a more useless sight.

[reidun]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

Ok, so claydoh says this:

I see no problem sharing a /home partition, but you would have to use different usernames for each OS. I have been doing this for years myself, though I now only keep to 2 at a time now, maybe 3.

Whereas Snowhog says this:

Sharing a /home partition among multiple distributions is not recommended.

And oshunluvr says this:

To belabor the point a bit - if you share /home among various installs and distros you will eventually run into program differences that will/may cause issues.

So who is right? Oshunluvr and Snowhog? or Claydoh?

I'm wondering because thanks to oshunluvr I now have successfully partitioned my hard drive so it is like this:

1 Primary - Swap - 3 gigs
2 Primary - Hardy install - 10gigs
3 Primary - Extended - Containing all below
5 - Logical - Mepis 8.0 - 16 gigs
6 - Logical - Waiting for Linux Mint 9 - 16 gigs
7 - Logical - /Files, possibly /homes for each distro - 32 gigs

My actual home for Hardy is still on the Hardy partition, where as the /home for Mepis is on the /files partition because it allowed me to choose that option during the install. Because I have been having some issues with Mepis not allowing me access to the /files partition unless I'm logged in as root, I have been sharing the files that I backed up on my thumb drive between both distros for now. So I'm wondering if I can in fact have only one home with different usernames for each distro, or if I should do as oshunluver said and make a separate /home on that partition for each distro, and have a shared /files folder.

Thanks!

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

My comment and claydoh's are not in conflict. claydoh says this is fine, and he does it himself, as long as you don't use the same user name in the installed OS's. My comment would be true if you wanted to keep the same user name on each installed OS.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I was just going to say sharing a /home partition is not the same as sharing home directories...

Share the partition, don't share the userspace files!

[Snowhog]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

Share the partition, don't share the userspace files!

Which one wouldn't be doing if each OS, that was 'sharing' the same /home partition, was using a separate user name.

[reidun]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

Ok, so right now my Hardy and my Mepis both have the same username. If I change one username, can I then copy the Hardy /home to the #7 partition?

[oshunluvr]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I hate to answer this because I don't want to cause more confusion...but here it goes:

The default of most distro installers is to use a home directory the same name as the user name. The only thing you really NEED to avoid sharing is the actual directory the files are stored in. You can indeed do this by using different usernames for each distro. This means you'll need to remember the different username for each distro.

<<STOP READING HERE unless you really want some more info >>

But what if you want to make remembering usernames easy and retain the ability to share some files from one distro to another?

As most things in linux, home directory location is not a requirement but rather a setting. Most installers have the option of setting the user home directory during install. Assuming this option is available, simply use unique directory names. An easy way would be to use the name of the distro itself as your home. So you'd have /home/kubuntu /home/mepis /home/opensuse and so on. If you're not offered that option on install, there are several ways to repair this.

The second setting to concern yourself with is UID/GID. I am referring to the numerical value of your User ID and Primary Group ID. Again, most distros default to UID 1000 and assign an individual GID also of 1000. Also again, this is not a requirement but rather a setting. If you use the same UID/GID for every distro you install you will be able to enter all your /home subdirectories and access all your files from any distro without any special effort.

The username (the actual word you pick as your username for log in) is of little importance because it is stored in the password file of each distro. It doesn't actually effect your ability to access directories or files - the numerical UID/GID does. So you can use the same username and password for all your installs if you wish.

In this setup - I would suggest that you keep your data (documents, music, videos, pictures et. al.) in the home directory of your main install and replace the "folders" in your subsequent installs with links to the main /home/ folders or you could simply "browse" over to your other homes and access the files that way.

<<EVEN MORE DANGEROUS>>
A great use for having additional distros installed is you can install a second copy of your main distro to test programs and edits in before you try it on your main install. Thus preventing accidentally "breaking" your system.

For example: You want to test installing a windows game using wine. You boot to your "Test" install, install wine, spend 30 minutes installing the 10gb program, another 45 editing the setup files to get it to work, then you play it for 3-4 hours. Hey it work's and I like this program! I'm going to install it to my main install... then repeat all the time and steps above.

Is that 6 hours totally wasted? Not if you used the same UID/GID. You can simply copy the directory from your /home/test to /home/kubuntu and your saved games and settings will be there waiting for you. This may not work perfectly in all cases - but it will in those that the programmers followed the proper guidelines.

In a simpler use - you could attempt changing settings in your test install, like network or video stuff - and once you got it right copy the effected files to your main install.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

BTW: Whichever path you decide to attempt, it's not very difficult. We'll step you through the few commands needed...

[miKeyBabid]

Re: Can a dual boot system use the same home partition and swap partition?

I recently set up a /home partition shared by 2 OSs.

It's definitely possible to do and -- so far -- I haven't come across any problems from doing so (althought it's still early days yet).

I'll set out for you what I did because I think you're heading along the same lines.

1. install your OSs, choosing the relevant /, swap, and /home mount points. Don't use the same user names for your users.
2. make sure to figure out where you're going to put grub etc,.
3. boot into your primary OS. if you've already created your user look up the UID and note it down. Next, create a new group and assign it a GID; make sure you note down that number as well.
3. now you want to assign your new group as the new primary group of your user.
4. open up your /etc/fstab entry and replace default with

auto,users,exec,grpid

to the end of the line for /home.
5. reboot into your 2nd OS and repeat steps 2, 3, and 4. remember to use the same UID and GID numbers BUT a different user name.
6. everything should work fine from here on.

here's the man mount page info on grpid :

grpid|bsdgroups and nogrpid|sysvgroups
These options define what group id a newly created file gets.
When grpid is set, it takes the group id of the directory in
which it is created; otherwise (the default) it takes the fsgid
of the current process, unless the directory has the setgid bit
set, in which case it takes the gid from the parent directory,
and also gets the setgid bit set if it is a directory itself.

Here's a link to my stumbling efforts to get this working on a clean Lucid install (Oshuluvr gave me some good advice as well)
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3111480.0

Mike