two linux one home

[kinka]

Hi everybody,
with the release of Ubuntu 7.10 I decided to get it as a chance to do some housekeeping and to reinstall the Ubuntu linux. I decided as well that now for me it is maybe time to try Gentoo, so this is my question:

Because I do not a lot of space in my hard disk (20G) is there a way to share the same /home partition between the two OSes? If this could be a possible option which are the files I should be careful with? ( I am thinking for example at all those hidden conf files such as .bashrc).

Thank you to everybody!!!
P.S. would be the /home partition be schizophrenic?

[oz]

If you pick a different username for each distro, you can share a /home partition. Otherwise, it's very problematic and not recommended.

[Thrillhouse]

Sharing /home is definitely possible and quite common. I do it on my machine. It's not all that difficult, either. The only thing you have to be careful of is when you get to the partitioning stage of each distribution's installer, you are sure to make a separate partition for /home and are sure that both installers are referring to that same partition (/dev/sda3, or whatever).

It does cause some problems, though, if you use the same user on each machine. Configuration files get used for both installs (Gentoo and Ubuntu) so for example, if you used Gnome on both Gentoo and Ubuntu, you would have the same configuration. Any change you made to one would be applied to the other because Gnome's configuration files are kept in ~.

That's the biggest drawback I can think of. Though, there may be others. I would recommend creating two different users for both installs. That way, you avoid some of those headaches but can still share files between the two.

EDIT: ozar beat me to the punch.

[kinka]

thank you very much two both of you for these useful information. Now going to bed, I will try tomorrow. Bye


I am schizophrenic... and me too!!