I often try new distros or upgrade the one I am using. Currently I have four partitions on my hard drive. Two are for two different linux distros, one for swap and another for M$. I have just moved from mainly working on one linux distro to the other which has meant copying lots of files from one /home/myuser directory to the other and changing lots of permissions. basically a pain.
I am thinking of re-partitioning to include a permanent /home partition which can be used by either linux distro. This way I can install or upgrade distros to my hearts content without having to worry about transferring user files. So the question, does this work, is it practical, are ther any pitfalls?
Cheers
Ian
On Sunday 29 February 2004 22:50, IanBell wrote:
I am thinking of re-partitioning to include a permanent /home partition which can be used by either linux distro. This way I can install or upgrade distros to my hearts content without having to worry about transferring user files. So the question, does this work, is it practical, are ther any pitfalls?
The only problem I can see would be if there was significant version gaps between any tools or applications that use a .profile in your home dir.
For example I happen to know through personal pain that both Grip and Phoenix/ FIrebird/Firefly have made non backward compatable changes to the format of their configuration files between versions. I am also sure I've encountered stuff that silently upgrades it's configuration files on first run (KMail ?), of course breaking backwards compatability. But overall I'd say that if you keep to distro's of the same era these problems should be few and far between.
Wayne
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IanBell wrote:
I am thinking of re-partitioning to include a permanent /home
partition which
can be used by either linux distro. This way I can install or upgrade distros to my hearts content without having to worry about
transferring user
files. So the question, does this work, is it practical, are ther any pitfalls?
The main problem is ensuring the UID for a particular user is the same on all systems, as it is the UID number not the username which matters when deciding who owns a particular file.
Luckily that is fairly easy to achieve, by fiddling with /etc/passwd a bit.
- -- Stuart Clark mailto:stuart.clark@Jahingo.com http://www.Jahingo.com/
On Monday 01 Mar 2004 11:27 am, Stuart Clark wrote:
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IanBell wrote:
I am thinking of re-partitioning to include a permanent /home
partition which
can be used by either linux distro. This way I can install or upgrade distros to my hearts content without having to worry about
transferring user
files. So the question, does this work, is it practical, are ther any pitfalls?
The main problem is ensuring the UID for a particular user is the same on all systems, as it is the UID number not the username which matters when deciding who owns a particular file.
Luckily that is fairly easy to achieve, by fiddling with /etc/passwd a bit.
So far this has not been a problem, so long as I always create my main user first with the same name.
Ian
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IanBell -
Stuart Clark -
Wayne Stallwood