sharing /home between distros?

[drakebasher]

jpalfre, you made sure to copy all files, right? Most of the files that cause all this trouble are hidden files, with a "." as the first character. You don't see them by default either in the GUI or with the 'ls' command. How did you copy the files? You would need to preserve all attributes. I think 'cp -a' would do it. Finally, you would need to change the owner/group for all files in the directory, from "me" to "me-gentoo".

[AndrewB]

if you have like your irssi config file set up
you dont need to re make it etc, same with folders for like xmms themes etc etc

So this assumes you're using same software / versions across all distros, no?

Also, this is not really applicable for the OP who is looking into different user directories under /home for each.

he is only lookin into it because sum1 said it would mess up
well if you dont use irssi in both distro's then it will be ignored...no biggie
but it is likely that most apps will be used on both distro's
because the user picks that over an alternative

and most config files it doesnt matter too much about the version

[zba78]

I do it all of the time. It’s setup like /home/distroname/username
E.g.
/home/arch/user
/home/arch/user2
/home/slackware/user
/home/slackware/user2

Works perfectly fine. I also setup the usernames, groups and UID to be the same across all distros so data can be shared/symlinked (e.g. username= user, UID = 1001, group = users)

[jpalfree]

jpalfre, you made sure to copy all files, right? Most of the files that cause all this trouble are hidden files, with a "." as the first character. ...Finally, you would need to change the owner/group for all files in the directory, from "me" to "me-gentoo".

i did copy all hidden files... and i don't think i need to change the user. I am using the same username for all distros but each distro just has a different home directory. It should work.... i think

i think the problem is that gdm is loading the default session... which is .... i'm not sure. I want the default session to be kde..but i don't know how to do this in gentoo. I thought just doing this would be fine:

$echo "exec=startkde" > ~/.xinitrc

that .xinitrc file was copied when i copied everything... so shouldn't it work?

can anyone tell me how to make the default session kde?

[HawkFest]

Seems like it should work in theory. But if you're going to give them different subdirectories anyway, why bother with having them share /home?

So that free space is managed more intelligently. However it looks like some tweaking needs to be done, as one example quoted here:

I do it all of the time. It’s setup like /home/distroname/username
E.g.
/home/arch/user
/home/arch/user2
/home/slackware/user
/home/slackware/user2

Works perfectly fine. I also setup the usernames, groups and UID to be the same across all distros so data can be shared/symlinked (e.g. username= user, UID = 1001, group = users)