Sharing storage area (linked to /home) between two distros?

[anthony baldwin]

anthony baldwin wrote:
> Okay, I just backed my whole /home to an external drive, and
> 
> Now, I going to delete everything visible (important/not deleting 
> .hiddenconfigfiledirs) in home, reduce the main partition to c. 5gb, 
> make 2 other partitions, one of 5gb, install Linguas OS on it,
> and the other partition will be the remainding 190ish GB of the drive 
> (minus the swap), and will be used for storage accessible to both Ubuntu 
> and Linguas OS.
> 
> Then I will copy everything I just backed up into that storage area.
> 
> I would try to share a /home between the two, but I don't think it will 
> work with Ubuntu and LinguasOS (which is PCLOS based), considering that 
> various app/configs that stay in home will need to be different for 
> each, and permission, uid gid stuff between the two will be more 
> complicated than I want to deal with...but, storage, that's not a big 
> deal.  I will just automount the storage on both OSs and link it in 
> /home/me for each.
> 
> Think that will work?
> 
> Is 5gb enough for the install of each distro, provided that literally 
> nothing will be stored in /home, besides the usual .hiddenconfigdirs ?
> And, a link in /home/me to the storage partition?
> 
> If there is a simple way to share /home between these two systems, I 
> would be interested in learning about that.
> 
> thanks
> tony
> 
> 
> 
I thought I would share my success on this one.

I did all of the above stuff...backed everything up the external drive, 
shrunk my dapper partition, deleted a partition (had gusty on it), then, 
after some reconfiguration of grub (another thread), I finally got them 
both up'n runnin' properly.

Now, I had backed up all of my stuff to my new external drive.
So, I have dapper and linguas os each on a 20gb partition,
and have another 150 gb partition for storage.
To dapper it is /media/storage, and for linguas os it is /mnt/storage.
Putting a link in my home dirs doesn't seem to facilitate much.
I mean, if I open the home dir in a file manager, I can click through, 
but, as far as saving documents and stuff, I still have to surf around 
to /mnt/storage, or /media/storage...A little clunky.
But it is working.
I had to mess around with permissions and stuff to get it to work, but,
basically, what I did was, for both systems I created a new group with 
the same GID, and added myself to that group, and gave that group r,w 
permissions to that partition.
So, I can access all of my documents, tunes, etc., on that partition, 
but, each system has it's own /home (although, there's not much in there 
now).

I really had to screw around with permissions and keep booting one 
system and then the other to figure that out.
Even just moving the stuff from the back up on the external drive was 
troublesome until I got it figured out.
Likely there are folks on this list that would have known what to do 
from the beginning.
I'll get there.

BTW...ubuntu is just better...
I mean, I can't get tbird to cooperate with PCLOS, nor evolution, and 
especially can't get tbird with lightning, or sunbird to cooperate, and 
those are pretty well a part of my routine now.  Dunno what the issues 
are there...I'll have to harass the PCLOS folks about that.
On their forums...would you believe they don't have a list like this?
I mean, WTF?  Every distro I have ever used has had lists!

And, you must forgive me if my writing is substandard, at the moment.
I've been up for over 24 hours.

Thanks,
tony


-- 
Anthony Baldwin
http://www.BaldwinLinguas.com - Translation & Interpreting

http://www.LinguasOS.org - Linux for Translators

Así también, la lengua es un miembro pequeño,
y se gloría de grandes cosas.
He aquí, ¡un pequeño fuego ­cuán grande bosque enciende!