Easiest way of distro hopping?

[varaonaid]

Hi,

I'm fairly new at linux but have already found myself trying out new distros on a regular basis. I never seem to find one that's quite "perfect" so I'm enjoying trying out the new releases as they are available.

Here's my question though. I have my primary distro installed then I have a separate partition for trying out new distros (if I like the livecd's well enough to install). Thing is, I end up making a new username since I was advised that sharing a complete /home/usr across distros can be problematic which obviously means that all my personal files, etc are in another /home/usr directory. (BTW, /home is another separate partiton) What do you other distro hoppers do to get all your files and settings into a new distro on a regular basis? Use softlinks? Copy everything over? Keep files in a static /home/files directory that isn't linked to any username or distro? I think maybe my journey into linux is becoming more of a hobby that I expected, especially in regards to distro hopping and I'd like the easiest way of keeping all my files and settings organized and accessible.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, advice and opinions. Thanks in advance!

[bryansmith]

I usually copy my files over to my Windows partition - if I don't have that much, I will copy them to my FAT partition or put them on my 2GB usb stick.

[techieMoe]

When I was distro-hopping on my desktop PC (rather than using a virtual machine on my laptop, which I do now), I had one harddrive with my "stable" OSes and personal files I didn't want to lose, and a second harddrive for my test runs.

Both harddrives where never plugged in simultaneously; I would unplug one and plug in the other just to make double sure I didn't format the wrong one. As far as personal data, I never really bothered. Usually I knew within the first day or two whether I was going to keep a distro so I didn't really have a lot of time to build up any files I would want to keep.

For testing purposes I used a DVD that I burned with media files of various formats, a few commercial games I purchased a while back, and some common drivers (Nvidia for instance). Don't know if that helps you, but there you go.

[Roxoff]

I'm not a disto hopper, but I could be easily...

I have an LDAP user directory (serves through samba to a domain, too) and NFS homes mounted from the server. I could use any distro, connect to my server and mount the homes... I dont even need local accounts on the desktop machines.

[daacosta]

I'm not a disto hopper, but I could be easily...

Come on, admit it, cleanse yourself, repeat with me: I am a distro w&^re

[MikeTbob]

Come on, admit it, cleanse yourself, repeat with me: I am a distro w&^re

I coined a term awhile back,,distro slut!
Time for me to fess up and admit it, I have fallen off the wagon and begun distro slutting again recently. All I can say is, I'm impressed with all the changes going on with the different distros, old and new.

But to the subject at hand, I just keep a CDR with my favs on it....if you got more than 700 MB of favs...feel free to ignore me here. I think you could use the /home partition with multiple OS's but it would be a very good idea to assign a directory to each one , after you get it installed, kinda like
/home/user/Mandrake
/home/user/Mepis

Would that work, guys?

[daacosta]

I coined a term awhile back,,distro slut!
Time for me to fess up and admit it, I have fallen off the wagon and begun distro slutting again recently. All I can say is, I'm impressed with all the changes going on with the different distros, old and new.

As I am! Let's see what have I tried:

Xandros
Red Hat
Fedora
Mepis
Suse
FreeBSD
NetBSD
Debian
Ubuntu
Knoppix
Damn Small Linux
Slax
Feather

I guess that doesn't make me a distro whore... Just a curious individual experimenting with free operating systems...