Comments on: Why I don’t recommend it

By: steve

steve — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:01:56 +0000

I never *ever* put important data on a partition that gets mounted at boot, that’s just asking for trouble when you wanna distro hop. For my money it’s always best to have a few boot partitions available for distro hopping and the vast bulk of data stored on a separate partition that has to be manually mounted. I lost a truckload of data thanks to not observing this rule during Ubuntu upgrades. But then Ubuntu is another steaming pile I’d rather not talk about.

cheers & beers
Steve

By: thealphanerd

thealphanerd — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:38:24 +0000

What I would do is create a server and copy it there, using it as the universal home directory, or as a backup mechanism.

By: Daniel Moerner

Daniel Moerner — Thu, 14 May 2009 03:43:39 +0000

I always follow a simple system: When I install the new system, I don’t add the other partition as /home in the installer. Next, I boot up the new system in single-user mode, and:

mv /media/old-home/.* /media/old-home/configs

Then I cp -a /home/$USER/.* /media/old-home. Then I rm -rf /home/* and mount the old-home on /home. Then I perform a hand merge between the configs directory and the new dot-files, and add the partition to fstab. This avoids problems with the installer and inconsistent dotfiles.

By: A visit with Arch « Motho ke motho ka botho

A visit with Arch « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:26:10 +0000

[...] return to Arch on this machine has been a mixed blessing. I did, as I have mourned repeatedly, lose about half of the music I have downloaded from Jamendo to bizarre filesystem errors apparently brought on by sharing the home directory [...]

By: Ridgeland

Ridgeland — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:43:14 +0000

This is for my home PC, not some corporate server.

My approach has long been a /Data partition of 100+ GB for music, photos, downloads etc. And 10 GB for /UserHome. Distros are installed to partitions of 10 GB (I have twenty on my two hard drives). /home only has settings, not data and I don’t upgrade distros just do fresh installs with a new /home. There are just a few settings ~/.something that I keep the old one. Firefox is kept in /UserHome/.mozilla/myfirefox.default Once a new distro is installed on a partition, if it uses Firefox 3 I just ln -s /UserHome/Firefox/.mozilla ~/.mozilla. I do that before even trying Firefox for the first time. Then all bookmarks etc are shared between many distros. A new bookmark I make in Mandriva shows up the next time I boot to Ubuntu. I do the same for Thunderbird, just bookmarks for gftp, and just a few other settings like .bashrc

I started with Fedora Core 4 and my user ID is 500. With Mandriva I just set the first user as 500 in install. With Ubuntu I use an initial userID (like almostroot) then as soon as it boots $ sudo gedit /etc/login.defs to change min user ID to 500, reboot and create my usual ID with user 500. Ubuntu’s default min user is 1000 which is a problem.

I find it hard to believe users would put data in /home. To me /home is OS user preferences and nothing more. Things like mp3s, jpegs etc are totally OS independent and should be on a different partition.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:19:19 +0000

You sould always back upp your home directory. But instead of reusing it, you sould simply copy over the config files needed as you install programs. And change the owner/user etc.

It does’nt take that long to get all the files you need, but it results in a mush cleaner /~

By: JakeT

JakeT — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:49:06 +0000

It’s always a permissions thing that kills me–on the new distro, my new UID is never the same, so it can’t write to my home dir and barfs when I try to login.

So I rename my home dir to name-old just before I start the install, then copy everything over. It gives me a chance to sort through and only get the stuff I need.

I’m still looking for a more elegant way to do it, though.

By: Ali Gunduz

Ali Gunduz — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:58:38 +0000

I should keep this in my mind since I may be migrating from debian to arch next week