[single /home partition for many distros or versions?]

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Sep 16, Perry did say:

> P.S.
> I hope this answers your question, but I have one of my own, slightly 
> disgressing from the original topic of this thread:
> It is highly recommended to mount a separate /home partition (as opposed to 
> have it automatically created under / on the same partition), 
> *but can you use a single /home partition for many distros or versions?*
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

All right, I'll bite, this is after all what I do... Although it has
been done, I myself don't recommend doing it that way. Especially if
your running different distros with different version levels of the
same software installed.

> If you proceed thus, some settings you do on one distro are written in /home 
> (.kde, .config) and would affect the other distro, wether you like it or not. 
> And there could (???) be conflicts or incompatibilities.

Exactly! 

> Another way to go would be to create instead of /home, a "/perso" partition to 
> mount onto any system you boot into, but some very personnal stuff like your 
> mail,  addressbook and calendar will not be copied to this partition (I think 
> Linux could be improved in that respect).
> Someone has some experience in this regard?

I currently run 3 linux distros on my laptop:

Kubuntu Jaunty on /dev/sda5
OpenSuSE 11.0 on /dev/sda6
Sabayon 4.2 on /dev/sda7

I maintain a manually updated grub partition on /dev/sda3
I have a small vfat partition on /dev/sda2
I permit a very rarely booted copy of vista to exist on /dev/sda1

And I have something like that /perso on /dev/sda8 

Which since I only need to provide the personal partition for one user 
(which happens to be jtwdyp) I mount it on /home/jtwdyp/com on all
three of my linux distros. But I could just as easily have configured
it to be /common. And then had a /common/jtwdyp & perhaps a /common/perry.
Which model I'll use for any further explanation...
Either way, to make it work every user involved must have the same
user id number on each and every linux you expect this to work with.
It's best if each user is assigned to the same primary group id number on
each linux as well. Though I'll confess I failed to maintain that some
time ago and it hasn't hurt me yet...

I don't use a "calendar" application so I can't say how well that can
be shared across the applications. I use alpine for my mail, which I
keep in local folders. My mail is retrieved via fetchmail using procmail
as an mda which it processes and stores in mail folders under ~/mail
However since I moved ~/mail to my personal partition directory
which using the /common/user model would be
/common/jtwdyp/mail
Then by creating symbolic links such as:

ln -s /common/jtwdyp/mail /home/jtwdyp/mail

If your mail client insists on using ~/Mail instead of ~/mail you
could perhaps use something like:

ln -s /common/perry/Mail /home/perry/Mail

In this way, with each of the Linux distros, no mater which one I'm
running, alpine uses the same mail files I  tried to do the same with alpine's
~/.addressbook & ~/.pinerc files but it kept insisting on replacing
the symlinks with hard files so instead whenever I make changes, I copy
the new versions to the common partition. And then I can copy them
back into the other linux's ~/ dir the next time I boot them.

In a similar manner any application that lets the user configure where
the user files should be written, can be configured to use a directory
that actually resides on the common partition. And/or using more symlinks
such as:

ln -s /common/jtwdyp/my_documents /home/jtwdyp/my-documents
ln -s /common/jtwdyp/images /home/jtwdyp/images
ln -s /common/jtwdyp/lyxfiles /home/jtwdyp/lyxfiles
etc...

Though It can pose a problem when the different distro's have different
versions of the same application which has changed it's file formats...
In example the LyX document processor has fairly recently made a major
revision in the format of it's .lyx files.

This was annoying because I keep my .lyx files in my common partition. 
Sabayon was the first of my distro's to automatically convert .lyx files
from the lyxformat 276 used by LyX 1.5.6 (which until I upgraded to
Jaunty was what apt-get gave me on Kubuntu) into the lyxformat 346 used
by LyX 1.6.x...

So If I wanted to open the same .lyx files from the other distro's I had
to first use the lyx2lyx script from the newer LyX 1.6.x version to
convert them back... But eventually Kubuntu caught up, and since it's
rare that I want to run LyX on the outdated OpenSuSE installation, I
don't really need to bother anymore...

I've learned that firefox doesn't like me to try to play with it's
bookmarks folder. So I use the export and import bookmark functions
to initially set them up, And I keep a text file on my personal
partition where I paste any url I might want to add to the other
bookmark folders. 

Hope this helps...

-- 
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|   <0>   <->	   Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|	^		J(tWdy)P
|    ~\___/~	     <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>