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

[Perry]

Le Thursday 17 September 2009 09:33:28 Goh Lip, vous avez écrit :
> I have quite a similar setup as Joe, I have 1 partition to keep my
> files, like the /persona partition mentioned above and another which is
> like a shared home. In the shared home, the files is s-linked to various
> distros, but since start of kde4, and I maintain kde3 as well, I had to
> convert email to thunderbird to keep compatibility. I don't have any
> problem (bookmarks, addons or flash) with firefox even if they are of
> different versions. No problem either with chromium. (the 64 bit is
> fast, small, like opera, but opera is incompatible with many websites).
> You can try to s-link from the shared home some lib, etc or var files
> but be careful and backup first. These help in reinstalling some
> applications. Note that when I install any OS, the shared home and
> /persona partitions are not part of the installation process. After
> installation, modify fstab to mount automatically  these partitions and
> s-link relevent files.
>
> I also have a dedicated grub2 partition which boots up every OS, so if I
> change or modify anything in any distro, there is no boot problem or
> bootup to old kernel issue.

Thanks Joe and Goh,

Many interesting points in your mails.
The grub location is something I never thought about, and it was only by 
chance that I didn't run into problems (because I never reaffected 
the "wrong" partition).

*I noticed I have many instances of grub.*
The most recent one, on Hardy, is only a couple of day old.
As I understand:
 the grub/menu.lst was updated when a new initrd.img was installed, then a 
change at a much lower level, before Linux or M$ kicks in, made this file the 
active one. Perhaps it is the BIOS that updated something on the MBR (??? not 
sure about the details). Before this time, it was probably the grub/menu.lst 
in the Jaunty partition that was active, since I (re) installed it after 
Hardy. Indeed the grub-installer worked very intelligently.

Now imagine I had wanted to use only Jaunty and to reaffect the Hardy 
partition as a /home or /perso partition (perhaps reformating it), I would 
have been left with a unbootable system, even M$, and no way to ask for help, 
until I use some rescue model (on the hard drive for M$, but will perhaps 
just reinstall) or a Linux CD. Plus no clue why it happened.

I hope I will rememeber to pay attention to this "detail" in the future.


Thanks a lot		Perry
-- 
BOFH excuse #443: Zombie processes detected, machine is haunted