2 distros..1 /home

Stuxnet

i currently run ubuntu with my /home folder on its own large partition,
ive just started 1st yr of comp sys in UL this week and they run fedora on their machines in the labs, so i was gonna install beside ubuntu on my laptop so i can get a feel for it, can i share my current /home ie point to my /home during the install process, or does it need its own ?


thanks in advance

Eliot Rosewater

I'd say you can do it but there might be some small nigly errors. For example, when I had Ubuntu 9.10 and 9.04 using the same home the Firefox logo couldn't be found in one of them. There were also some a number of errors with desktop customisations if I rightly recall.

Nothing serious, mind, in my experience. Just make sure you don't format /home when you install Fedora! My advise would be to install Fedora on a single partition and then edit /etc/fstab to "point" /home to the different partition after installation.

human 19

I Tried this a couple of years back with Fedora and mint. Fedora being the fussy bollix that it is, there were ownership issues with the home partition. If I remember correctly Fedora wouldnt let me access it because my Fedora username didnt "own" it. I think I could change it wit chown in the CL but then had a problem accessing it via mint. I would suggest checking this out in the Fedora forum.

theintern

Basically, it can be done, but you may run into weird problems with configuration and permissions and things like that. I would recommend creating seperate partitions just to aviod possible problems.

bman

If you're not bothered about having different usernames in Fedora and Ubuntu then you can use the same /home partition for both but your settings and data will be in separate folders.

Example: You are currently using Ubuntu with the username bob. Your data and settings are stored at /home/bob . You install Fedora and use the username bob-fedora. Your data and settings for Fedora will be stored at /home/bob-fedora . No interference. Same number of partitions.

Dorsanty

Technically you could create your user account in Fedora after the install. Running as root create a new account and match the uid and gid of your current Ubuntu user.

Still if there are major version differences for the software you have, various user preference files may be incompatible between the two or cause errors.

Stuxnet

bman wrote: »

If you're not bothered about having different usernames in Fedora and Ubuntu then you can use the same /home partition for both but your settings and data will be in separate folders.

Example: You are currently using Ubuntu with the username bob. Your data and settings are stored at /home/bob . You install Fedora and use the username bob-fedora. Your data and settings for Fedora will be stored at /home/bob-fedora . No interference. Same number of partitions.

went with this option in the end !! less hassle

and i can still read/write to bob-fedora home with a right click nautilus Browse-as-Root script in ubuntu !!
handy for any drag and drop of files, which is all i want really

thanks