[Yhslug] sharing /home with mutliple distros

[Kevin Cole]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> By not paying attention, I formatted /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb, but
> now I'm taking it as an opportunity to set up a weird mutliboot
> configuration.  One problem remains.  The distros are fighting over who
> gets permissions on /home.  I *could* make a different username on each
> and then have file permissions issues between all the different
> /home/me1 /home/me2 etc, but I want to avoid that (besides that it'd
> still mean knowing which distro I was in when I saved something).  I
> would like them all to share the same home drive then (not just the
> partition), but I get errors in both Fedora and Ubuntu (haven't set any
> others up yet) regarding permissions on ~/.dmrc and how they have to be
> 644.  I keep setting them to that, but it seems if I tell Ubuntu to use
> those permissions, it breaks Fedora and vice versa.  Does anyone know a
> way around this?  I don't want to have to have multiple home drives.

I don't know that this is the source of your troubles, but...

In both distro's you should find /etc/passwd.  Do both versions of this
file have the same user id NUMBER for the same user NAME?  (Focus only
on the users you've added, not the system accounts... at least for now.)
If they aren't the same, make them the same, and then be sure to set the
ownership of the appropriate /home/username to the right username.

The simplest thing (in my mind) is to pick your favorite plain-text
editor, and edit /etc/passwd to make the changes.  Then, issue a:

    chown --recursive username.username /home/username

(Yes, you can type "chown -R username:username /home/username" as well.
Picky, picky, picky. ;-))

-- 
 Kevin Cole                    |  Key ID: 0xE6F332C7
 Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo Team     |     WWW: http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/
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