Dual boot, common home partition/directories?

[Pygoscelis_papua]

I've seen the discussion on shared partitions and that HFS+ is stable in 2.6 kernels. Has anyone set up a dual boot machine in which you have a single home directory on an HFS+ home partition that is shared between Linux and Mac OS X? Any pitfalls besides case insensitive but preserving?

Thanks,

Pypa

[iTux]

Just in case you don't already know, if you intend to use Mac-on-Linux (Mol), you will not be able to have them both mounted in Linux and in OS X at the same time.

Note: I read somewhere that it is possible to make a HFS+ case sensitive.

iTux

[Pygoscelis_papua]

Setting up a common home partition went quite smoothly. Briefly, I had set up LInux to use an HFS+ partition as /home. I needed to get that home partition used as /Users on Mac OS X.

Under Mac OS X (10.3) I followed the instructions at www.macosxhints.com for setting up a separate Users (home) partition (ignoring the parts of the instructions for separate Applications and swap partitions).

Then, under Linux I took the following steps.

1. I changed my uid and gid under Linux to be the same as those used by Mac OS X. That was quite easy now that Mac OS X (in 10.3) creates accounts with the same uid and primary gid as many Linux distros do. And, I changed the owner and group of all files and directories in my home directory tree.
   
2. Mac OS X does not set up a ~/.bash_profile. So, I modified .bash_profile to make it conditional
   

   Code:

   if ( uname | fgrep -q LInux )    then         [[ -f ~/.bashrc]] && .  ~/.bashrc fi

   
   
3. Mac OS X does not provide a .bashrc. I decided to set up .bashrc so that it would be shared by both systems and source system-specific sections.
   a. I renamed the linux .bashrc to .bashrc-linux
   b. .bashrc reads as follows
   

   Code:

   # Place things common to both systems above this point if ( uname | fgrep -q Linux )   then      . ~/.bashrc-linux   else      . ~/.bashrc-osx fi

   
   

So far, it works very well.

[Pygoscelis_papua]

OK, I forgot about .xinitrc and running X under OS X. I use Apple's X server.

Under OS X, the X server exits if it is launched and ~/.xinitrc does not do anything (i.e, does not launch an applicatiion). I decided to create a .xinitrc-linux and to have a hard link to it created when I log in to Linux and destroyed when I log out.

.bash_profile now looks like

[pindar]

Glad you could make it work. Just one word of warning: I have double-boot systems both in my office and at home (a G4 and a G5). On both, I use the hfs+-support to access my OS X partitions from gentoo and the ExtFSManager on OS X to access my gentoo-partition (and this saved my butt a couple of times). It works flawlessly - most of the time. But every once in a while, there's an incomprehensible glitch. From gentoo, the OS X partition is read-only, it needs to be unmounted and remounted with a special command so is writeable again. From OS X, the gentoo partition can't be mounted at all; after booting into gentoo and checking it, everything works again. Minor glitches, but if you share your ~, this might lead to major problems.

[Achille]

I have tried to share a common hfs+ partition between OSX and Linux. I have discovered a strange bug with Gnome: when I put something in the trash, I can't find it in the trash; the trash remains empty, so that I can't empty it. However, what is moved to the trash can be seen in $HOME/.Trash with Nautilus. Therefore the trash is unuseable.

Does anyone observe the same?

[Pygoscelis_papua]

I haven't tried gnome. I use just fluxbox.

Sorry,

Pypa

[elpollodiablo]

[elpollodiablo]

[Pygoscelis_papua]

I took the easy way out. I know linux much better than OS X, so I changed my UID and GID under linux to be the same as those under OS X. I knew that would work, and I didn't know what kind of trouble I might stir up on OS X.