changing /home to a new partition

[jturnbul]

Not a complete noob, but unsure how to go about this... or need affirmation.

I want a shared /home directory between all my linux disto's. Right now each distro has its own /home dir on each individual partition. I have a large partition I share amongst all my OS's. Since Kubuntu is my main OS, I want to transfer that /home dir
my shared drive /hda5, my home folder is /jnt
My thought is this...
$ cd /home
$ mv -r /jnt /dev/hda5
then add a line to fstab like
/dev/hda5 /home ext3 defaults 0 2

then either reboot, or mount hda5 on to the /home dir on my root partition.
something just doesnt feel right about it to me though to feel confident to do it.

Couple other question...

>>by pointing my other OS's to this new home folder, will my desktops look like my Kubuntu one with all my settings and bookmarks etc

>>Do i also risk losing some specific setting that maybe my other OS (FC5) has?? I guess I would have to examine the hidden directories in FC5, and transfer over the ones that are not in Kubuntu

Lastly... if I install a 3rd OS, which I am looking to do, and point it to the shared home directory at install, would it not overwrite the current settings, atleast in common apps like KDE, firefox, etc, and in .config .bash* files Or would it outright erase it all

[aysiu]

Re: changing /home to a new partition

I want a shared /home directory between all my linux disto's. Right now each distro has its own /home dir on each individual partition. I have a large partition I share amongst all my OS's.

This is a bad idea, as each distro has its own way of setting up configuration files. If you use all of the distros, after a certain point, you're going to get some serious breakage.

Your best bet is to have one shared data directory that's not /home. You can mount it at /home if you want (say, /home/data), but I would highly recommend against creating a shared /home directory.

[whoiam55]

Re: changing /home to a new partition

or use diff. usernames on diff distros so you have many /home/insert_your_username_here. Keep these folders only system purpose. I can't recall any quick trick, but I'm sure you can overcome this situtation with a cool command called "ln".

[jturnbul]

Re: changing /home to a new partition

Your best bet is to have one shared data directory that's not /home. You can mount it at /home if you want (say, /home/data), but I would highly recommend against creating a shared /home directory.

thats the way I have it now with softlinks. Maybe I have misinturpereted, when I hear people say they have a seperate /home partition, that they use for all their distros.

I wondered about the same thing, with different settings it would make a mess of things.