reorganizing /home's

[Frode Petersen]

Michael Hennebry skrev:
> I'm dual booting F9 and F11.
> There is a partition that mounts on F9:/home and on F11:/home.
> I suspect that my ~/.* directories are stepping on each other.
> I want to reorganize so that the to-be-former home partition
> mounts on F9:/homes and on F11:/homes.
> F9:/home would be a symbolic link to /homes/F9.
> F11:/home would be a symbolic link to /homes/F11.
> User fred would have home directories with canonical names
> /homes/F9/fred and /homes/F11/fred .
> Each would have a symbolic link to /homes/fred,
> his old home directory.

I have a somewhat similar setup between F10 and CentOS 5.3. I don'tknow 
if it fits  your situation, but this is what I do:

- a /home partition for each system (root:root) (5 GB in my case)
     - contains home directories for each user (as normal)
- a /home/homework common partition (root:root) (60 GB)
     - each user has a directory with the same name
         and uid:gid as in /home
     - each user has a trash directory with the same uid:gid as above
         The name of the trash dir has to be ".Trash-<uid number>"
- in /home/<username>: symlink named "work" pointing to
         /home/homework/<username>/work
         This is where all work files go, so you would move them
         here from your old home.

You have to enter uid and gid numbers yourself when you create users on 
the second system to make sure they are the same on both systems.

I did it this way because I was uncertain about whether apps' config 
files might have changed between Fedora Core 6 (which CentOS 5.3 is 
inderectly based on) and F10. This means that changes made in an app on 
F10 (which I normally use) will not be made on CentOS, unless I move 
that app's config files to /home/homework/<username>/ and use symlinks 
to point to them from ~ . (I did that for Thunderbird and Firefox, 
though it wasn't straightforward in those cases.)

Another thing to remember is that devices might be named differently. F9 
and F11 should probably not be a problem, but the two DVD-RW readers I 
have, one IDE and one SATA, was named differently on my system. I had to 
create symlinks in ~ (.idecdburner and .satacdburner) pointing to the 
correct  device names and configure apps to use those.

If you want all the .-files and .-directories to be shared between the 
two OS instances, this would probably be an impractical way to go about 
it, but if the work files are what you try to share, it might be worth 
consideration.

Frode Petersen