universal home partition??

[Clay Weber]

On Monday, September 06, 2010 12:57:26 am Errol Sapir wrote:
> 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

I think you can tell tbird to open a profile located somewhere outside the 
default location, but someone with it installed might know better


clay