two distro's using the same home directory?

[General_Faliure]

Hello.
I was wondering if this is possible?
I acquired two small, and cheap (30 Gb) ssd's.
One i have installed with Xubuntu with the /home directory mounted on a 250 Gb hard drive, which works well.
The other i want to add to a system which already runs linux mint on a hard disk.
Is it possible to install a different distro on the ssd and just mount the /home directory to the /home directory on the hard drive?
Both are older test systems which i use to try out distro's and things like this.

[ajgreeny]

Depending on the two distros this could be a route to big problems resulting from slightly different configuration files and folders in the two OSs.

It will be much better to keep /home in the main root partition of each OS and use the HDD only as a data partition. It is very easy to make symbolic links from each data folder on the HDD to a similarly named folder in the home of each OS. Your data files will then appear to be sitting in the home of each but will actually be on the large HDD. You will need to edit /etc/fstab in each OS and add a line to mount the HDD at boot which we can help you with if you are not sure how to do so.

[oldfred]

Some more details on sharing a data partition:
The actual user settings are small. My /home is 2GB with most of that as .wine with Picasa which I have not yet moved to my /data. Because /home is small I now keep it as part of / (root) which is a total of 11GB with /home.
Then I can have a fully functioning system on one drive but have data linked in from other partitions on other drives.

Data can be shared without the possible conflicts of user settings being different in different versions. I only copy some settings from one install to the next, normally. But I have to separately back up /home and the /data partition. Also saves the error of reformating a /home partition accidentally. I never reformat my /data and just configure / for install.

Splitting home directory discussion and details:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1811198
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1901437
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1734233&highlight=%2Fdata
User Morbius1 prefers bind over linking in post #4
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2192848

[yancek]

The problems with this are discussed above. If you don't consider yourself a Linux expert or are not familiar with the various configuration files here, best not to do it. Much easier to use a separate data partition.

[General_Faliure]

I have made symlinks of of :/media/tux/77333325-7ff0-4791-aefd-145015bb4da6/home/tux/Downloads/ and ~ Documents, ~Video's and~Music to /home tux (on the ssd, i removed the original one's).
I used midnight commander for that.
How should the fstab line look like to mount the hdd at boot?

[ajgreeny]

I have made symlinks of of :/media/tux/77333325-7ff0-4791-aefd-145015bb4da6/home/tux/Downloads/ and ~ Documents, ~Video's and~Music to /home tux (on the ssd, i removed the original one's).
I used midnight commander for that.
How should the fstab line look like to mount the hdd at boot?
That fstab line depends on the filesystem you have on the partition that is on your HDD and how many partitions are on it. Show us the output of
sudo parted -l

[General_Faliure]

It's one ext4 partition and 4 Gb swap:

Model: ATA SAMSUNG HD502HI (scsi)
Schijf /dev/sda: 500GB
Sectorgrootte (logisch/fysiek): 512B/512B
Partitietabel: msdos
Schijfvlaggen:

Nummer Begin Einde Grootte Type Bestandssysteem Vlaggen
1 1049kB 496GB 496GB primary ext4 opstart
2 496GB 500GB 4293MB extended
5 496GB 500GB 4293MB logical linux-swap(v1)


Model: ATA FASTDISK 32G (scsi)
Schijf /dev/sdb: 32,0GB
Sectorgrootte (logisch/fysiek): 512B/512B
Partitietabel: msdos
Schijfvlaggen:

Nummer Begin Einde Grootte Type Bestandssysteem Vlaggen
1 1049kB 27,7GB 27,7GB primary ext4
2 27,7GB 32,0GB 4292MB extended
5 27,7GB 32,0GB 4292MB logical linux-swap(v1)


Here's my fstab:

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=2285a8a5-26cb-4874-8a7a-073c5eb2856b / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=62b3761d-0c4e-4813-9ddd-32006ba02932 none swap sw 0 0
UUID=77333325-7ff0-4791-aefd-145015bb4da6 /media/tux ext4 defaults 0 0

I added the last line, now it seems to work, i'll let you know if i run into trouble, it's a test system, so it's no big deal if it breaks:P

[ajgreeny]

That last line is fine.
You could to change the final 0 to 1, but otherwise no problem that I can see.