[vox-tech] Running Multiple Distros

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Robert G. Scofield (rscofield at afes.com):

> How can you have two home directories?

By creating a second one, and specifying its use in the role of /home
when installing the second distribution.  (I'm not trying to be flip:
I'm serious, and will explain further.)

> For example, these are the relevant partitions on this system:
>
> /dev/hdb2 has SuSE 9.2
> /dev/hdb3 is the spare
> /dev/hdb7 is /home
> 
> It seems like any new distro put into /dev/hdb3 will automatically use
> /dev/hdb7 (which SuSE 9.2 is using), right?

No.  You should, in basically any distribution's installer, be able to
initiate creation of any new filesystems you wish to exist, and also
specify explicit mountpoints for any and all filesystem.  So, when you
install the second distribution, if you have free disk space, you might
create /dev/hdb8 using some of that disk space, and specify that the
second distro should use /home as its mountpoint.

Alternatively, you could install the second distribution _entirely_
within /dev/hdb3, ignoring entirely the opportunity to specify a
separate mountpoint for /home .  (You could, if you wished, cause the
second distro to automount /dev/hdb7 at mountpoint /home-on-suse or
similar, if you needed access to those partitions' files.  Ditto
mountpoint /rootdir-on-suse or similar for /dev/hdb2.  However, you
might have some serious problems keeping the owning users and groups
aligned between the two distros, given likelihood of differing UID and
GID assignments between the distros' /etc/passwd and /etc/group files.)

> Is there anyway to install a new distro on /dev/hdb3 and have it use a
> /home on /dev/hdb3?

You betcha.  Just assign the new distro's "/" (root directory)
mountpoint to /dev/hdb3, and just avoid assigning mountpoint "home" to
/dev/hdb7.  Then, /home will live within /dev/hdb3 by default, rather
than being on a separate filesystem.