sharing partitions among multiple Linuxes

zgentoo · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 27

I'm planning to repartition my hard drive and re-install Gentoo. While I'm at it, I figure I'll set up some spare partitions to play with some other Linuxes too.

I figure they can all use the same swap space, but is there anything else that could be comfortably shared, like, say a partition for /tmp, or would that just be asking for trouble?

/home also strikes me as a possible candidate, understanding that I'm definitely asking for some trouble with configuration files reacting differently to a different environment and different versions of software.

ronmon · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 4:34 pm Post subject:

I would say that you have summed it up pretty well.

Sharing your swap partition shouldn't be a problem. The home directory is a potential sticky depending on which gnome / kde / whatever_wm packages and versions you use in the different distros. /tmp should be okay but I've never tried it.

mvr_rennes · Apprentice Joined: 23 Oct 2002 Posts: 155

I used to share my /home between RH and Gentoo (back when I used RH, that is). I didn't have any problems, but I had to fiddle a bit with UIDs and default groups.
/swap is ok to share too.
Cheers,
M

TPC · Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 6:12 pm Post subject:

you could have the kernels for all installs in the same /boot, and /var/tmp could probably be shared too (if you use one partition for that, not many do that). if you share /home you could share /root.
Can't think of anything else.