Installing Ubuntu on a laptop that has Windows 7 and Linux Mint

[Pongo A. Pan]

On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 19:07 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 2 March 2012 17:55, Pongo A. Pan <pongo_pan at fastmail.us> wrote:
> 
> > This can be very problematic.  If you do this you will have competing
> > and conflicting configuration files (often in the form of hidden
> > directories in your home).  A better (but somewhat more complicated) way
> > to do this is to have a small separate home for each distro and a
> > common /data partition with things like Documents and Pictures linked
> > with simlinks.
> 
> I personally would disagree, but it is one way of doing it, true.
> 
> Me, I would probably have a separate *FAT32* partition, allowing one
> to readily share data between Windows as well as multiple Linux
> installations. However, I don't symlink folders into there - that
> strikes me as hazardous.

Not particularly wanting to beat the already well pulverized dead horse,
but I've been doing the symlink thing for several years now with very
few problems.  I've got .mozilla, .kde, .local, Documents, Pictures,
Music, .gnucash (and its data) and others symlinked between four
different distros on this play-around machine, and I can get to all my
stuff, have the same state of my RSS reader, same Firefox setup, etc. in
all of them as the same primate.  Once in a while there is an
incompatibility caused by one install having a much newer version of
something (happens with evolution), so I just remove the symlink there
and manually adjust things when it's important. 

Of course if I were designing bridges or life-support systems here I'd
probably not do this, but I'm a superannuated idler and good about
backups.

The difficulty with multiple user names is ownership of things.  If
you're John in one distro and Jack in another, one of you is UID 1000
and the other is 1001 and unless you do SuSE-like things with the users
group you've got trouble, unless *all* your stuff is on lame- at ss
fat32.  

Stupid ispell thinks anything with an at-sign is a link and "distro"
should be "bistro."


-- 
pongo pan
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:52:00 -0800
Epicurus up 15:12, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.05
Linux 3.2.0-18-generic
Ubuntu precise (development branch), gnome-session 3.2.1, unity 5.4.0