Best Patition Setup For My Situation

[jmadero]

Hi All,

I think I asked something similar before but can't seem to find the thread and don't remember an answer that worked so I apologize in advance if it's repeat:


My situation:

Dual booting Ubuntu and Bodhi -- can't ditch Ubuntu yet because there are some things that either don't work properly or I just haven't figured out in Bodhi
Users -- I have two users each with accounts in both distros

Current Partition Setup:
/dev/sda1 -- Ubuntu root ("/")
/dev/sda2 -- Bodhi root ("/")
/dev/sda3 -- Home ("/home")
/dev/sda4 -- SWAP


Current problem:
I currently am using spideroak to sync my documents between my users on each distro. I have USER1UBUNTU USER1BODHI USER2UBUNTU USER2BODHI. This makes it so I have replicated data that is then just synced (thus taking up twice the space and if I'm not online the data won't sync). Furthermore my music and pictures are just on my Ubuntu User account so I have changed permissions to allow other users to access these files but it's less than ideal and I've hit a few weird bugs. Just to mention one, with my music I cannot play the music using a music player in Bodhi unless I first play a file using VLC, no clue why, it says the files are not accessible in clementine and amarok but if I play a single file with VLC it'll then let me play any file in the music players.


So my question is what would everyone (anyone) recommend for this situation. I want to maintain privileges on home folders (ie I don't want to just make them all 777). One suggestion was a separate data partition but I see a couple potential problems with this:

1. Privileges for folders, I'd like pictures/music accessible by both users but documents only accessible by the user who creates them (unless of course otherwise changed by user).

2. Partition Owner: From my understanding only one owner can have the partition. Problems that I've had before with this is that if you are a non owner then deleting your own files from the partition becomes a pain.

3. Loss of space: Setting up partition means "guessing" at sizes for my home partition, data folder, and root partitions. It means setting aside an extra amount of space that I might never use but could use in a different partition (ie. guessing that home partition should be 30 gigs but then only ever using 10).



Thanks in advance, this has been an ongoing issue with dual booting and I'd like to settle it once and for all.


P.S. Just to make it worse on my wife's machines she's tri booting with Windows and I'd like to permanently solve that setup as well.

[elija]

When I used to dual boot I always stored documents on a separate partition and then I mounted them under my home directory. I mounted the partition as the Documents directory IIRC. Maybe you could adapt that to your two user scenario?

Edit: That's not going to help with Windows though.

[jmadero]

Yeah that sounds like the best route but with multiple users it becomes an issue of partition ownership. Before my issue (and I can be honest not a huge issue but it bothered me) is that if you're not the owner of a partition even if you have permissions to use the partition you run into dialogs with deleting files. More specifically in Ubuntu on my wife's machine I see the issue with her NTFS partition, she is the owner of the partition so when I use my user on her computer and I want to delete something it won't send it to the trash instead it asks me if I'm sure I want to delete it and if so it'll be permanent (skips the send to trash all together). I have this issue documented here:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubu...fs-shared.html


I really want to avoid this issue if possible, it'd be nice if I could make the owner of the partition "everyone" and then make specific permissions on folders (ie, her documents, my documents, shared pictures, shared videos, shared music)

Not sure if this is possible