12.04 and 13.04 sharing a /home folder

Question

Would it be a bad idea to have 12.04 and 13.04 share a /home partition? I was about to replace my hdd and was thinking of doing this. Would it be especially unstable in terms any settings files which might be in conflict?

Answer 1

as far as I know HOME folder consists of private information of a user. sometimes Its a good idea to have but not every time regarding a common Home folder partition.

Because Different versions of Ubuntu you'd like to use. They will consists of different configuration files and they may conflict with each other If you are supposed to use both of them for different purposes.

I found something for you , actually its not exactly what you have asked but its worth reading Multiple Users, Single Workstation, 1 home folder (Can this be achieved, if so how?)

Answer 2

I would not advice you to do that! Newer releases has newer version config files. When you boot back to an older system your applications may start to misbehave since the config files are for a newer version.

On my laptop I have Karmic, Lucid and Precise and they all mount the same home folder. My home directory on these systems are different (/home/sylwester-lucid for lucid, ...), but I have a shared directory for the XDG directories. So my Desktop, Documents, and other folders that Ubuntu has as default places are shared.

You set the absolute path to those directories from gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. You may choose to have them in the system you use the most or in a separate one. The latter makes it easier to clean up when you decide to remove a system.

To make other directories available you can just add it as a bookmark or hold down CTRLSHIFT while dragging extra folders from the shared space to one of your installations home folder. This will make a symbolic link that justs opens the original folders.

Answer 3

It may be OK, but I have another method that works out better for me.

I have a partition with directories for documents and media files, and I create symbolic links to them; then, I delete the directories in my home directory, and replace them with the links, using the exact same name. If you use the same name, and do it all without logging out, then the links will get the same icons as the original (it's set in a config file, and be be changed, but it's easiest to just do it this way).

One nice thing about this method is that I share these files with any distro I want to test, and I can also share it with Windows if I have it. Windows (at least recent versions including XP) allow you to change those directories.

If I want to change distros, or reinstall, it's pretty easy to do

Another way would be to mount the partition into the folders in the home directory, although I haven't tried this - just something I thought about later.

Answer 4

I currently do this with my system. I use backbox which is ubuntu 12.04. And Kubuntu 13.04. There is a shared /home partition. This way I can use both sides equally.

The thing I found though is you WILL have to use the same user name on both partitions. Also you will have to create this partition on install.

For example: The first install would be backbox, you would create a partition of backbox then a /home partition from the drop down menu.

The second install would be the ubuntu. After the ubuntu, you would have to make a mount point to the /home for your user home. Then edit your /etc/fstab to make it survive a reboot.

This is assuming your system doesn't figure out what's going on at first. Sometimes ubuntu will solve the problem of mounting the partition as your home on it's own, sometimes it will not. I don't know why either.

One more note, this can not be down between fedora and ubuntu. Any redhat distros starts the UID at 500 while ubuntu starts at 1000.

I hope that answers your question. Install the earlier version first create the home during that install and install the newer version second. It should play nice. If not, mount the /home as your home and set it to become permanent in your /etc/fstab.

And one last warning, if there is special configuration files in the /home, they might fight. I personally haven't had this problem. I like kde and gnome. I think two gnomes will fight.