Mostly off topic, Evolution question

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 12:52 +0200, Andrew Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> please forgive how off topic this posting is; I have a query for the
> multi-booters on the list.
> 
> Have any of you any experience with sharing data between distributions
> with high similarities? The specific scenario I'm after is this:
> 
> I have FC5 on a laptop, as well as the newest Ubuntu. I spent the last
> half year or so using FC4 exclusively and was pretty much very pleased
> with it all. FC5, however, seems nearly a step backwards and I'm not at
> all sure I want to use it much longer. But I'd like to keep it through a
> fair shakedown phase, maybe see if any coming updates brighten things
> up. Parallel, though, I'd like to test drive Ubuntu as a potential
> replacement. Right, nuff background.
> 
> What I'm after is sharing a single evolution instance between FC5 and
> Ubuntu, so that I won't lose my mind trying to keep track of which mail
> might be where. Eventually I'll put up a dovecot server or something
> somewhere and migrate everything "off site", but for now I'm curious if
> I can share data in this way considering Gnome and Evolution are pretty
> standard on both sides.
> 
> If I were to, say, move my .evolution folder to a separate partition and
> mount it in my home dir in both Distros, what are the chances that
> within a week I'd have munged my mail beyond repair?
> 
> Anybody out there done anything like this?

I have.  While I can't speak to Evolution specifically, it does work
with Mozilla/Thunderbird and I've not had any issues regarding
corrupted mailboxes.  Since the data regarding the account is kept in
the .evolution (or .mozilla or .firefox) directory (logins, mail paths,
etc.), it should work fine unless Evolution itself changes the way it
stores things.  All bets are off then!

BTW, a standard practice is to create an entirely separate "/home"
partition for user home directories.  Obviously, this gets mounted as
"/home" on all of your distros so the users have a consistent home
directory regardless of which one is booted.  You must synchronize the
passwd, shadow and group files of course, unless you're using NIS, NIS+
or LDAP for authentication.

What specific problems are you having with FC5?  I find it hard to
believe you consider it a "step backward".  Beyond some upgrade issues
with the installer, FC5 is pretty good.  There are a lot of inherent
differences "under the hood" between it and FC4, so perhaps you're still
trying to get used to those, but I'd hardly call it a step back.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.    -
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