Art Alexion on 18 Nov 2004 13:02:02 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] Sharing home directories between two distros 

eric@lucii.org wrote:

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 07:13:23PM -0500, Art Alexion wrote:


Two distros. Assume compatible data and config formats. One distro sets up the first user as 500:100, the other as 1000:1000.

How to share things like mozilla directories (mail bookmarks, etc) without screwing one up?




I tried this several years ago and had no end of trouble with different
versions and settings between distributions. I've finally solved it on a workstation by maintaining a separate partition that gets mounted the
same way in both distributions. Then, even though you have separate home directories, certain directies can be linked (soft link) to this
common directory.

An example:

          distro A                      distro B
  --------------------------      ------------------------
  /home/eric (/dev/hda5)          /home/eric  (/dev/hda6)  <- diff
  /home/common (/dev/hda7)        /home/common (/dev/hda7) <- same

To keep Mozilla's files in sync, I move the desired .mozilla directory from /home/eric/.mozilla to /home/common/.mozilla.

Then:
ln -s /home/common/.mozilla /home/eric/.mozilla for each distro. Seems to work so far.
The same is true for your mail directories but you MUST be sure that the
mail program you use in each distro will not mess up the mail files for the other. Since email is so crucial, I'd recommend using the same program and the same verison on each side. That's what I do.



This is an excellent solution as what I want is primarily to share .mozilla and the Documents tree. (Basically I want to get the bugs out of the new distro before canning the old one.)

Another fact: /home on old distro is mounted on its own separate partition. I mount that partition in the new distro. This has caused me some weird problems. More below.

Question, do I have to use a common directory or can I just mount old disto's /home to /mnt/rh_home on the new distro and then put symlinks in new distro's /home/user doing things like replacing the .mozilla directory with a .mozilla symlink pointing to /mnt/rh_home/user/.mozilla and another symlink named /home/user/rh_docs pointing to /mnt/rh_home/user/Documents?

Meanwhile, temporary mounting for copying between distros is not working right. If I mount Ubuntu's root directory in Red Hat using a simple

   mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/ubuntu

I can read/write as user to my home directory in /mnt/ubuntu/home/arthur. But a corollary command in Ubuntu

   mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/rh_homes

will not permit a regular user to even view /mnt/rh_homes/arthur.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that there is no root user/password in Ubuntu -- instead uses sudo with regular user's password?



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