universal home partition??

[Errol Sapir]

On 09/05/2010 02:29 PM, claydoh at claydoh.com wrote:
>> I have a separate partition for /home. I only use a KDE desktop, and
>> have exclusively used Kubuntu. After installing 10.04 I had several
>> problems with Kubuntu as spoken about in the "impressions of Lucid"
>> thread. I now want to try other distros that use KDE. Is there a way of
>> keeping my same home partition for other distros? I'm not worried about
>> the layout of my home partition but wouldn't want to loose my documents,
>> e-mail etc.  I thought of maybe even having the other distro as a dual
>> (triple) boot. I was thinking about trying Fedora or PClinuxos.
>> Errol
>>
>> --
>>      
> You are perfectly fine having a common /home directory, but if you intend
> to use a common *username* across different distros, you most likely will
> have ownership problems as different distros may assign a different user
> *id* number that correlates to the user name. This could render you unable
> to login with that username in another OS. Also, sharing a common username
> between distros will also mess with your desktop layout, wallpapers, etc.
> depending on what themes, images and default settings each OS has
> installed And some distros may also store local configs in a different
> folder (.kde4 instead of .kde for example). I recommend using different
> usernames. you can easily copy config files between the different OS's.
>
> As for accessing documents, you should still be able to browse to them
> fine, but a separate folder or partition for these file might be a good
> idea so you can save them back.
>
> Clay
>
>
>
>
>    
Thanks all for the good advice, I realize now that what I should do is 
have a "common file area" rather than a common home partition. I also  
got similar help from the Kubuntu forum. See:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3111871.0

The only question I now have is how to have a common email program for 
all the distros. I use Thunderbird and of course want to only have one 
email repository. How do I do that?
Errol