Sharing Home Directory

[shanenin]

Since I have so many household dutys I should be doing, I decided to waste my time playing on the computer. I decided to try and share my /home directory between gentoo and ubuntu. It is pretty quirky like I expected. The first thing I noticed is my .bashrc from gentoo is not playing well with ubuntu. That should be easily fixed enough. I expect all of my config files in my home direcrtory to cause problems. This will be kind of fun to see if I can get them all to work well together.

[iccaros]

I think you will run into lot of problems. too many hidden folders for applicaItions that could be diffrent versions

take firefox, I can see you loosing bookmarks or other settings.you

plus in some of these hidden folders are pointers to where the main program is, this would be diffrent on diffrent distrobutions..

but ...

you could write a script that checks uname and makes eviroment varables to take care of these

[shanenin]

firefox is working well, I think i have the same versions. I noticed kde not finding locations of icons, so I am emergeing kde 3.5 to match ubuntu version of kde 3.5. I will see if that helps.

[shanenin]

after logging back into gentoo, stuff went horribly wrong. I was not able to even start an x session. I gave me errors about bad permissions on my config files. I then rebooted back to ubunutu and tried to fix my permissions. I then really screwed stuff up. I am not longer even able to log in in either system ubuntu or gentoo.

Edited June 3, 2006 by shanenin

[jcl]

I gave me errors about bad permissions on my config files.

Edited June 3, 2006 by jcl

[shanenin]

It has been a long time since I cleaned up my harddrive so I formatted it and started new. I kind of thought(in the back of my mind) UIDs might be an issue. I am kind of impulsive and just went through with out researching and did it(sharing the home directory).

I am installing gentoo fresh now, When this is done, I will give ubuntu another shot with a shared home directory. Are you saying besides user name, I need to have a matching UID? If that is the case, how would I go about setting them manually?

Do you think it is a lost cause trying to get my home directory shared, if so I will not even try again.

Edited June 3, 2006 by shanenin

[iccaros]

if you set up a directory sever (fedora has one ,red hat, novell(suse)) or just openldap you can set one home folder and the same user would be able to log on to diffrent boxes, and should work accross distrobutions.

(you could even have windows users log in.. or in better terms, the same user for windows and linux boxes)

how to set uo linux for ldap login

http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/ldap-linux.htm

linux ldap server

http://yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialLDAP.html

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/R...quickstart.html

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_LDAP_SAMBA_PDC/Basic_Setup

then just set up a samba/nfs server to hold home folders

Edited June 3, 2006 by iccaros

[shanenin]

I was looking at my /etc/passwd file

freevo2 ~ # cat /etc/passwd | grep shane
shane:x:1000:100::/home/shane:/bin/bash
shane2:x:1001:100::/home/shane2:/bin/bash

I have two users shane and shane2. I am guessing my UIDs are 1000 for shane and 1001 for shane2. After installing a second distro, am i just able to manually edit that file to make them match? Is 100 my GID?

edit added later//

after looking at the man page for useradd, it seems I can just assign any GID and UID I need to

Edited June 4, 2006 by shanenin

[iccaros]

watch for uid's under 1000 and GID's under 100. They are normaly reseved for system level devices.

[shanenin]

This time around stuff seems to be working pretty good. Their are a few bugs. I am not able to use a display manager to start x in both systems. I am using kdm with gentoo, but startx with ubuntu. If I switch in between distros firefox acts as if it was the first time run.

[jcl]

There'll probably be some differences between the config files on the two systems. You could rig up your .profile to modify the environment based on the current system. A while back I experimented with storing all of my dot files in a tree under ~/config (or something) and symlinking them back into ~. You could do something similar, storing per-system config files and then having the login script link them into the place.

(This would be easier if Linux supported the variant symlinks (I think that's what they're called) planned for Dragonfly, where the symlinks can contain shell variables that are expanded when the links are dereferenced. Replace your, e.g., .Xsession with .Xession-ubuntu and .Xsession-gentoo, symlink .Xsession to .Xsession-${SYS} and create a env variable SYS containing the name of system.)