1

I'm going to make a dual (or more) boot setup to allow an extended look at two or more flavors of Ubuntu. I typically set /home in its own partition. It would be convenient to have the same partition as /home for all installations. I'll be using a single drive. How practical is this?

I can foresee difficulty if the same programs are installed in separate instances. Is there a practical way to link most storage space in /home across all instances but keep settings separate?

Twelve Kanaw
  • 15

1 Answers1

0

Indeed do not just use one common /home for different linux distributions. This is not guaranteed to work, even more if the linux distributions are quite different.

Instead share your user data only between the installations.

  • Set up each distribution with a separate /home
  • Make sure each user on each distribution has the same UID and the same user name. Having the same UID is important, because the permission system identifies users by UID, not by login name.
  • Make all of these distributions access the same user data by replacing the default user folders ("Documents", "Pictures", ...) by symbolic links pointing to the partition where your user data are stored.

Note: Symbolic links work seamlessly from an end user perspective, but you could also "mount bind" instead, which is a bit more complex to set up, but has the "linked" folder behave in all respects like a regular folder.

vanadium
  • 97,564