dawynn
August 14th, 2009, 10:37 AM
I have maintained my own multi-boot machine for many years. As long as I only had one user, everything always worked fine. I could install multiple distributions, and I would always have the same home directory, which all the various logins could share.
Now I'm trying to establish a computer for the whole family that will also have two different grub distributions (probably the stable version, and the test version). I've got "distributions" on right now, although both are at various incarnations of 9.04 Ubuntu.
Here's the dilemma. As I was installing on each of these systems, I set up myself as the first user. All well and good. I'm up and running on both systems -- and I can use my home directory just fine. On the first system I installed, I have three other established users. I tried to build one of these users into the new system, and for whatever reason, it doesn't want to share the home directory, even though I tried to create the user the same way on both systems. The new system is choking and telling me that the user is already established. I tried renaming the old home directory and letting the system create a new one. That works fine, on the new system -- but now the old system doesn't recognize the home directory as belonging to that user.
So, how can I safely copy all user information from the first distribution over to the new distribution so that, whichever distribution anyone logs into, they can use the same /home directory?
Now I'm trying to establish a computer for the whole family that will also have two different grub distributions (probably the stable version, and the test version). I've got "distributions" on right now, although both are at various incarnations of 9.04 Ubuntu.
Here's the dilemma. As I was installing on each of these systems, I set up myself as the first user. All well and good. I'm up and running on both systems -- and I can use my home directory just fine. On the first system I installed, I have three other established users. I tried to build one of these users into the new system, and for whatever reason, it doesn't want to share the home directory, even though I tried to create the user the same way on both systems. The new system is choking and telling me that the user is already established. I tried renaming the old home directory and letting the system create a new one. That works fine, on the new system -- but now the old system doesn't recognize the home directory as belonging to that user.
So, how can I safely copy all user information from the first distribution over to the new distribution so that, whichever distribution anyone logs into, they can use the same /home directory?